KABUL -- The biggest anti-US protests since the fall of the Taliban spread across Afghanistan on May 12, as unrest sparked by alleged abuse of the Koran at the US jail in Guantanamo Bay left three more people dead.
Seven people have been killed and at least 76 injured during three days of violent demonstrations, all of them in clashes with security forces and police in conservative towns east of the capital Kabul.
Angry Afghans shouting "Death to America" poured onto the streets of Kabul itself for the first time on Thursday and protests at the reported religious slur have now broken out in 10 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.
The Koran controversy has also spread to Pakistan, where demonstrations were held in Peshwar and Quetta, two major cities close to the border with Afghanistan.
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, a provincial official said.
Jalalabad was the scene of a major riot on Wednesday in which four people died when police opened fire to control a mob that torched the buildings of several aid agencies, the Pakistani consulate and the governor’s house.
"Two demonstrators died and one was seriously injured in Khogyani district today after armed protestors opened fire at police," deputy governor of Nangarhar province Mohammad Asif Qazizada said.
However a provincial spokesman said earlier that security forces had opened fire on a gathering of 100 villagers in Khagyani.
Meanwhile one person died and four were wounded when rioters attacked a police station in Chak district of Wardak province, which borders Kabul, and a weapons store exploded, interior ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal said.
The protests were sparked by a small report in Newsweek magazine last week that interrogators at the US military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, desecrated copies of the Koran by leaving them in toilet cubicles and even stuffing one down a lavatory to rattle Muslim prisoners.
More than 500 detainees, most captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, are held as "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo.
The US, which leads a coalition of some 18,000 troops hunting Taliban militants three years after the regime was toppled, has promised to look into the claims. The US military has not been involved in policing the protests.
But in Kabul, student demonstrators shouted slogans calling on US President George W. Bush to apologise to Islamic countries and set a US flag ablaze. The protest ended peacefully.
Thousands of people also took to the streets in the northern provinces of Parwan, Kapisa and Takhar, Laghman in the east, Logar and Khost in the southeast and the southern province of Kandahar.
The United Nations and foreign aid agencies evacuated hundreds of workers from Jalalabad fearing further violence.
Afghan officials have suggested that elements opposed to the US-backed effort to rebuild the war-ravaged country have coordinated the violence, and protests come amid a recent deterioration in security.
A candidate in September’s first post-Taliban elections was killed in a firefight on Wednesday that also left his driver and two suspected Taliban militants dead.
Veteran Afghan analyst Rahimullah Yusufzai said the protests gave the public a chance to vent their anger at President Hamid Karzai’s government and the United States itself, but were unlikely to be coordinated.
"This is the biggest protest campaign in Afghanistan since the ouster of Taliban regime. This is bloody, widespread and countrywide," the Pakistan-based analyst said.
"This also shows that they are fed up with the United States and they just needed a spark to vent their feelings," he said.
Previous anti-US protests in Afghanistan were sparked by the deaths of civilians in US military operations and by the Iraq war but none has been on a similar scale.
Karzai, who is currently in Brussels, said on Wednesday that the clash in Jalalabad showed the "inability" of Afghanistan’s institutions to deal with such situations.
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