THE full horror of last month’s US air strike on a hospital in Afghanistan has been revealed in a report by Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the international charity that ran the facility.

At least 30 people are known to have died in the sustained attack near the northern city of Kunduz.

Patients were burnt alive in their beds or as they ran and medical staff were decapitated and lost limbs.

Other victims, including a patient in a wheelchair, were mown down by the circling AC-130 gunship while fleeing the burning building.

MSF reported that 10 patients and 13 staff were among the dead, with seven unrecognisable corpses still unidentified.

The charity’s international president Dr Joanne Liu said: “A functioning hospital caring for patients… cannot simply lose its protection and be attacked.

“We need a clear commitment that the act of providing medical care will never make us a target. We need to know whether the rules of war still apply.”

The attack began at about 2am on October 3 and continued for an hour, with the gunship returning four times after the initial onslaught on the building.

The Pentagon says US army special forces called in the attack following a request from Afghan troops fighting Taliban militants for control of Kunduz.

Despite the late hour, the 140-bed hospital was busy, with staff catching up on a backlog of surgery.

The centre had seen a steady increase in the number of victims of violence since its opening in 2011.

All sides in the war recognised it as neutral ground, with its GPS co-ordinates circulated, and there were no armed men present at the time.

Of the 105 patients that night, about 20 were Taliban guerillas and three or four were government soldiers. There were also 149 MSF staff, many of whom were asleep, and one Red Cross delegate.

Repeated calls and text messages to military authorities failed to get the attack called off, even though they acknowledged that the hospital was being targeted.

Based on the Hercules transport plane, the AC-130 is heavily armed with artillery and high-powered machine guns.