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Karzai plans administrative shake-up

Agence France-Presse

Kabul, May 14, 2005|19:02 IST
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President Hamid Karzai is planning an administrative shake-up after violent Afghan protests over the alleged desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay left 14 dead and 120 injured, officials said Saturday.

They said Karzai, who returned home from Brussels early Saturday, was likely to replace the governor and police chief of eastern Nangarhar province where the bloody rioting started on Wednesday.

Officials told AFP Karzai held immediate consultations with officials on the security situation which has seen the worst anti-US violence since the fall of the Taliban more than three years ago.

Police opened fire to control a mob that torched the buildings of several aid agencies, the Pakistani consulate and the governor's house in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province.

Four people were killed and 70 wounded in the clashes, which spread to other Afghan cities in the following days.

"I know both the governor, Din Mohammad and the police chief Hazrat Ali will be replaced in Nangarhar," the interior ministry official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Police chief Ali, a former anti-Taliban commander is a powerful warlord, while Mohammad took the office after the killing of his brother Haji Mohammad Qadeer some two years ago.

Meanwhile diplomatic sources in Kabul said the International Security Assistance Force and US-led coalition forces were standing by for a possible evacuation of people should the situation worsen.

The international forces "are in high alert and ready to evacuate people in case of violence, with the cooperation of Afghan forces," the source said, adding that Afghan forces were handling the situation because the government had to show it had the ability to maintain law and order.

"But if it turns bad, foreign forces will intervene."

A senior police official in the capital Kabul, Colonel Abdul Hakim, also said police and law enforcement agencies were in a state of high alert.

Seven Afghans died on Friday in clashes with security forces in several towns and cities at both ends of the war-ravaged country, posing fresh problems for the US-backed Karzai's efforts to rebuild the country.

Afghan troops shot dead three people as protesters tried to storm the governor's house in southern Ghazni province on Friday.

Elsewhere, security was also tight in the northeastern Badakhshan province, where three people were killed in clashes with law enforcement troops.

Also on Friday one person was killed and three injured when the army opened fired on about 300 protesters in the southeastern city of Gardez.

Authorities have reopened schools in the eastern city of Jalalabad.

According to Newsweek magazine interrogators defiled copies of the Muslim holy book by leaving them in toilet cubicles and stuffing one down a lavatory to rattle Muslim prisoners.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Friday the US administration took the allegation "very seriously" and reaffirmed that the Defense Department had launched an investigation.

But General Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that no evidence had yet been found to support the charge.

Public wrath directed at the United States swept the Muslim world when demonstrators took to the streets in the Gaza Strip, Pakistan and Indonesia to protest the alleged desecration.


The road to recovery is not smooth. But the Afghans desire peace more than anything and their resilience provides the best key to the country's future.
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