(Kabul, AFG) - At least nine demonstrators were shot dead and dozens wounded Wednesday in violent protests across Afghanistan over the burning of the Koran 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.
Afghanistan is a deeply religious country where slights against Islam have frequently provoked violent protests and Afghans were incensed that any Western troops could be so insensitive, 10 years after the 2001 US-led invasion.
The US commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, apologised and ordered an investigation, admitting that religious materials, including Korans "were inadvertently taken to an incineration facility".
Allen and US Deputy Defense 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.
Two US officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP the military removed Korans from the prison because inmates were suspected of using the holy book to pass messages to each other.
The joint NATO probe with the Afghan government would examine why the Korans were removed and taken to a burn pit, a NATO spokesman said.
"It is a very vital part of the investigation that we find out what was the material, what was the reason for the decision to dispose of it, who gave the orders ... and what actually happened at the burn pit," German Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson told reporters in Washington via video link.
Local Afghan workers immediately "pulled material out that was partly charred and we have seen Korans that were partly charred," Jacobson said.
For some reason NATO rules about the careful handling of religious materials were ignored, he said.
"And somewhere a decision was made that was highly inappropriate and that brought us into a situation which is very delicate."
Jacobson told BBC World News TV that the incident was "probably an act of ignorance" and was "a mistake with grave consequences".
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.
"As a result of shooting by foreign guards of Camp Phoenix one of our countrymen was killed and 10 others were injured," an interior ministry statement said.
The demonstrators then tried to march on the city centre, burning cars and attacking shops as they went, but were driven back by riot police.
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.
In Jalalabad one person was killed as more than 1,000 demonstrators, many of them university students, blocked the highway shouting "Death to Americans, Death to Obama".
Elsewhere, one demonstrator was killed when about 800 gathered in Baraki Barak in Logar province, a flashpoint for Taliban violence south of Kabul.
Reports that the Koran had been mistreated first emerged on Tuesday, sparking demonstrations in Kabul and outside Bagram base.
