Afghan police Monday opened fire and turned a water cannon on demonstrators angry about allegations that Western troops torched a copy of Holy Quran, wounding at least three people, officials and witnesses said. Clashes erupted as police tried to prevent around 300 students, most of them men, from marching on parliament, the city's criminal investigation police chief, Sayed Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada, told AFP.
"Police fired at the crowd, one bullet hit me. I was closing my shop at the time," Sherullah, an 18-year-old man who suffered a bullet wound to his hip, said from his hospital bed. "They (policemen) were just firing. They were firing at the people," he said. Sayedzada denied that police fired towards the crowd, saying they only aimed their guns in the air. They also used water cannon, the police chief added. But a doctor at the emergency ward of Ibn Sina hospital said that at least three men suffering from "bullet wounds" had been admitted for treatment.
More than 15 police were also wounded in clashes between the angry mob and security forces, interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said. An AFP reporter at the scene saw about three dozen people, mainly young students, herded into a police vehicle and taken away. "We were demonstrating, we wanted to protest the burning of Holy Quran by the foreign forces but the police came and started beating us," a young man, refusing to give his name, said from the back of a police vehicle.
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