Afghan authorities said on Thursday they had recovered 12 more bodies of migrants who were thrown into a river by Iranian border guards this month to stop them from entering the country, bringing the incident's death toll to 17.
Afghan officials and survivors now say a group of about 50 men from Herat province who were trying to enter Iran were detained by its border guards and later forced into the Harirud river shared between Iran, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan.
"Fifty Afghans were thrown into the river. Seventeen bodies have been found so far," Abdul Ghani Noori, the governor of Gulran district of Herat where the incident occurred, said on Thursday.
Noori had said on Sunday that the authorities had retrieved five bodies from the Harirud river.
On Thursday he said a preliminary investigation showed that the migrants were thrown into the river at gunpoint in an area called Zulfiqar in Iran.
A day after the incident, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Seyed Abbas Mousavi issued a statement saying the "incident" took place on Afghan soil.
"Border guards of Iran denied the occurrence of any events related to this on the soil of our country," he said.
