Berlin  - Pressure was growing in Germany Friday on the Defence Ministry to reveal more about the airstrike in Afghanistan in which up to 60 people were reported killed while emptying two hijacked fuel tankers.

German officers called in air support to destroy the trucks. The army said in Berlin that more than 50 militants and no civilians were killed in the night-time strike.

In reports to appear Saturday, two newspapers quoted "NATO sources" saying it was implausible to maintain that no civilians could have been killed in the most violent incident yet in Germany's zone of responsibility.

The papers, the Koelnische Rundschau and the Stuttgarter Nachrichten, said NATO had been advising the German military to drop that stance.

The sources said it contradicted common sense to suppose that 50 armed rebels would congregate around stranded trucks. Some reports have said many of the people were villagers helping themselves to the stolen fuel.

Germans have been generally wary of the military mission in Afghanistan. The incident comes just three weeks before the German general election on September 27.

German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's own Christian Democratic Union (CDU), defended the officers who summoned the airstrike, saying the Taliban was a brutal, "but also intelligent enemy."

In remarks to appear Saturday in the newspaper Badische Neueste Nachrichten, he said, "Particularly in the Kunduz area, the situation is especially critical."

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the senior Social Democrat seeking to unseat Merkel at the polls, said Germany was doing whatever it could to avoid civilian casualties.

"The Taliban evidently will stop at nothing to destabilize the situation," a newspaper, the Ostsee Zeitung, quoted him saying in its Saturday issue.

Steinmeier has called for a timetable to be drafted to withdraw German troops, but has set no deadline.

The newspapers released the quotes to other media in advance of publication.

The opposition Left Party repeated Friday its long-standing call for all German troops to be pulled out of Afghanistan immediately. Its co-leader, Oskar Lafontaine, said the only way out of the "Afghan dead end" was by non-violence, aid and diplomacy.  dpa