At least nine demonstrators were shot dead and dozens wounded Wednesday in violent protests across Afghanistan over Holy Quran desecration at a US-run military base, officials said. The Afghan interior ministry blamed at least one of the deaths on "foreign guards of Camp Phoenix", a US military base in eastern Kabul attacked by protesters, but most were attributed by local officials to clashes with police.
The ministry said it would investigate all the deaths, blaming some of them on "security guards" at unnamed foreign bases. A spokesman said it was not known whether the guards were Afghans or foreigners. In Kabul and in provinces to the east, north and south of the capital, furious Afghans took to the streets screaming "Death to America", throwing rocks and setting fire to shops and vehicles as gunshots rang out.
In the eastern city of Jalalabad, students set fire to an effigy of President Barack Obama, and the US embassy in Kabul went into lockdown. The US commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, apologised and ordered an investigation, admitting that religious materials, including Holy Qurans "were inadvertently taken to an incineration facility". Allen and US Deputy Defence Secretary Ashton Carter called on Afghan President Hamid Karzai Wednesday to apologise again for the incident at Bagram airbase north of Kabul, the president's office said.
Karzai asked Allen to cooperate fully with a government investigation and told him to "make sure that such incidents do not happen again in future", a statement said. Karzai also urged the US military to speed up a transfer to Afghan control of the controversial US-controlled prison at Bagram, sometimes known as Afghanistan's Guantanamo Bay. "The sooner you do the transfer of the prison, the fewer problems and unfortunate incidents you will have," the president told Carter. In the capital, hundreds of people poured onto the main artery to the east, the Jalalabad road, throwing stones at US military base Camp Phoenix.
About 100 university students demonstrated in west Kabul and dozens more people gathered at parliament until they were driven away by police. Six protesters were killed and 13 wounded in Parwan province north of Kabul, provincial administration spokeswoman Roshna Khalid told AFP, saying the protesters had attacked police with rocks and some were armed. Elsewhere, one demonstrator was killed when about 800 gathered in Baraki Barak in Logar province, a flashpoint for Taliban violence south of Kabul.
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