Pakistan and Afghanistan yesterday braced for fresh protests over the alleged desecration of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, as Washington moved to calm Muslim anger over the report.
The main Islamic alliance in Pakistan, a key US ally in the war on terror, said its workers would hold peaceful rallies after Friday prayers from mosques in cities and towns across the country.
The multi-party Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, or United Action Front, staged demonstrations in two major cities on Thursday where hundreds of people condemned the alleged desecration reported by US magazine Newsweek last week.
PHOTO: AP
"We want to give a clear message to the US that Muslims will not tolerate insults to their faith and values," the alliance's spokesman Shahid Shamsi told reporters.
The top leader of the alliance, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, has written letters to Islamic organizations in different countries to collectively demonstrate their anger at the Guantanamo Bay allegations.
The US has promised an inquiry and action against soldiers who allegedly defiled copies of the Koran by leaving them in toilet cubicles and even stuffing one down a toilet to rattle Muslim prisoners.
Speaking in Sydney, Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri called for severe punishment for any US soldiers proved to have been involved in any abuse of the Koran.
"I have no doubt that the entire Muslim world is outraged. So I urge the United States administration to take very strong action against the culprits."
"Even the worst enemy of the United States could not harm the image of the US in the Muslim world as effectively as they've done if this is correct," he said.
In Afghanistan officials said yesterday that police and security forces were on high alert after seven people died and nearly 80 others were wounded in three days of violent clashes between protestors and government forces.
Two protesters were killed on Thursday when gunfire broke out as police stopped them marching into the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad from a district just to the northwest.
On Wednesday four people died also in Jalalabad when police opened fire to control a mob that torched the buildings of several aid agencies, the Pakistani consulate and the governor's house. One person died and four were wounded when rioters attacked a police station in Wardak province, which borders Kabul, on Thursday. A total of 10 of the 32 Afghan provinces were affected.
Troops and police patrolled the streets of a number of key Afghan cities ahead of Friday prayers.
The provincial governor had held talks with tribal chiefs, shopkeepers and religious leaders in Jalalabad urging them to help calm the situation. Police spread out across Pakistan to ward off disturbances.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice used an appearance before a Senate committee on Thursday to make a special statement "directly to Muslims in America and throughout the world."
"Disrespect for the holy Koran is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, tolerated by the United States. We honor the sacred books of all the world's great religions. Disrespect for the holy Koran is abhorrent to us all," she said, saying action would be taken if reports were true.
But the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, told a Pentagon press conference no evidence had been found to back the claims.
A portion of a busy road in Thailand’s capital early yesterday caved in, leaving a hole dozens of meters deep in front of a main hospital and forcing people to evacuate the area. Just outside a local police station and Vajira Hospital in a residential district of Bangkok, a roughly 50m hole pulled down power lines and exposed a burst pipe gushing water. Dozens of police and city officials cordoned off the site, while a pickup truck teetered precariously on the edge of the hole. Bangkok Office of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Director Suriyachai Rawiwan said at the scene that the collapse was
RESPONSES: Ukraine urged the West to strike stronger economic blows against Russia, while Moscow denied that it was responsible for drone incursions in Europe Ukraine yesterday said that Russia pounded the country with “hundreds” of drones and missiles overnight, killing at least four people in the capital alone, while neighboring Poland scrambled jets to secure its airspace. The attacks came after Russia warned NATO against taking sterner action in response to alleged incursions into airspace covered by the military alliance. The barrage also followed the revelation by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that Kyiv had received a US-made Patriot air defense system from Israel for use against Russian assaults. “Russia launched another massive air attack on Ukrainian cities while people were sleeping,” Ukrianian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii
The Netherlands yesterday pledged to return to Indonesia the remains of “Java Man,” the first-ever Homo erectus unearthed by modern scientists in a landmark discovery for human evolution. The Dutch plan to hand back about 28,000 fossils of the “Dubois Collection” taken by anatomist and geologist Eugene Dubois in 1891, when Indonesia was a colony of the Netherlands. They include Java Man’s skull cap, molar and femur that form part of evolutionary history — providing the first established link between apes and humans. Using convict labor to do the heavy lifting, Dubois excavated the remains in what became the most sensational ever find
The US house committee on China has urged Washington to ensure funding for the Philippines to counter Beijing’s “aggressive and destabilizing actions” in the South China Sea, according to a letter to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which warns cuts could threaten US security interests. In the letter seen by Reuters yesterday, the US House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought clarity on funding for the Philippine Coast Guard, noting that the US Department of State had sought a dramatically reduced budget for next year for International Narcotics
RSS