The Taliban administration has denounced Britain’s Prince Harry for his admission of killing 25 people while on military duty in Afghanistan, and a senior Afghan official has accused the royal of killing innocent civilians.

“We checked and found that the days on which Prince Harry is mentioning the killing of 25 mujaheddin, we did not have any casualties in Helmand,” Taliban leader Anas Haqqani told Al Jazeera on Friday. “It is clear that civilians and ordinary people were targeted.”

“This story is a part of the many war crimes of the 20 years of Western military presence in Afghanistan,” he said. “It is not the whole picture of the crimes committed by them.”

The Taliban leader earlier accused the British royal of committing “war crimes”.

“Mr Harry! The ones you killed were not chess pieces, they were humans,” Haqqani tweeted, referring to Prince Harry’s description that eliminating people who he said were “enemy combatants” was like removing “chess pieces” from a board.

“The truth is what you’ve said; Our innocent people were chess pieces to your soldiers, military and political leaders. Still, you were defeated in that ‘game’.”

The Taliban returned to power in August 2021 after US-led NATO troops withdrew following 20 years of military occupation of Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of Afghans, a large number of them civilians, were killed and wounded during the war. The country has still not emerged from the effects of the war.

The US-led forces as well as the Taliban have been accused of war crimes during the two decades of war.

Abdul Qahar Balkhi, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also criticised the comments by the British royal, which have received widespread criticism.

“The Western occupation of Afghanistan is truly an odious moment in human history, and comments by Prince Harry is a microcosm of the trauma experienced by Afghans at the hands of occupation forces, who murdered innocents without any accountability,” he said.