Baghdad, Iraq ? An Iraqi who claimed he witnessed Wednesday’s predawn airstrike by U.S. forces on a house in western Iraq said U.S. forces attacked a wedding party and killed more than 40 people.

U.S. officials continued to maintain Thursday that the strike was on a safehouse used by foreign fighters, but said they’d investigate the incident.

Videotape reportedly of the victims’ bodies has aired on Arab television and is fueling further outrage against the United States for what many Iraqis see as a pattern of abuse and disregard for Iraqis by American soldiers.

Basim Shehab, an organ player for a local band, said Thursday that he went Sunday to a border town near Syria to play at a wedding party. His descriptions of the party and the military operation couldn’t be independently verified, but other Iraqis offered similar eyewitness accounts.

On Thursday, Shehab was home in Baghdad to bury his bandmates, including a popular singer. He said his four fellow musicians and the singer — all relatives — were among those who were killed early Wednesday 15 miles from the Syrian border.

Shehab, 26, who claimed he was present and sleeping in a tent when the airstrike occurred, said the attack “was like hell. Everything was on fire.”

He spoke at the funeral of two of his bandmates, who were his cousins, in the al Hurriya neighborhood of Baghdad. Dozens of mourners attended. The two cheap wooden coffins used to return their bodies were leaning against the wall of a building.

In Ramadi, an Iraqi police official and a doctor confirmed the bodies of five band members from Baghdad were delivered Wednesday afternoon to the hospital morgue there, and that family members from Baghdad recovered the bodies Thursday morning.

Iraqi Mahdi Nawaf shows photographs of dead family members during a funeral ceremony in Ramadi. Mahdi said they were were killed Wednesday, when a U.S. helicopter fired on a wedding party in the remote desert near the border with Syria, killing more than 40 people.

On Thursday evening, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, senior military spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, said the incident would be investigated. But he continued to express skepticism that there was a wedding party in the remote area where the airstrike occurred.

“Because of the interest shown by the media, we’re going to have an investigation. Some of the allegations that have been made would cause us to go back and look at this,” Kimmitt said. “But it’s important to understand that this operation was not something that just fell out of the sky.”

Kimmitt said the operation was based on intelligence gathered by the military about the location, which he said was believed to be a way station on a “rat line,” a route known to be traveled by smugglers and foreign fighters slipping across the Syrian border into Iraq.

He said coalition forces encountered a group of 34 or 35 men and “a number of women, less than a handful” at the location.