By IINA,
Kabul : Two people were shot dead and several wounded when police in Afghanistan clashed Thursday with hundreds of Afghans protesting over a US soldier’s shooting of a copy of the Holy Quran in Iraq, police said.
Police blamed the shooting in the town of Chaghcharan, capital of the central province of Ghor, on protesters while a local legislator said the shots were fired by security forces.
The firing came as protesters, armed with rocks and sticks, had tried to storm a NATO base commanded by Lithuanian soldiers before being pushed back by police, regional police chief Ikramuddin Yawar said.
“There was shooting during the demonstration. Two civilians have been killed,” Yawar said.
The police chief said militants who had joined the demonstration had fired at the NATO base to “deteriorate the situation.” “As the people were trying to enter the base, they fired and two civilians were killed,” he said. Seven other protesters were wounded in the shooting while nearly a dozen police were hurt by the demonstrators, he said.”The situation is under control. We are holding meetings with Lithuanian troops to draw a joint plan to capture those behind the firing,” he said. But the head of the provincial council, Mohammad Daud Ghafari, blamed the shooting on the security forces. “Police and the NATO soldiers opened fire on the people and two civilians were killed,” he said.
The area is remote and it was impossible to immediately independently verify what had happened. About 2,000 people had earlier poured onto the streets to protest against the March incident, in which a US soldier riddled the Muslim holy book with bullets during target practice, local police chief Shah Jihan Noori said. The demonstration later turned violent, Noori said, claiming protesters were incited by “Taliban elements.” “A large number of people tried to attack the Lithuanian base, the UN office and governmental buildings,” the police chief said. The men, chanting anti-US slogans, had hurled rocks at security forces and tried to enter the gates of the base before being pushed back by about 300 policemen, he said.
In Kabul, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed there had been a demonstration near the base of the NATO civilian-military provincial reconstruction team, headed by Lithuanian soldiers. An ISAF spokesman had no further information. US President George W Bush has apologised to Iraq, and US military authorities have apologised to the local community west of Baghdad where it took place, stressing it was an “isolated incident.”