Afghan leader assails reported body burning, orders an investigation

KABUL, Afghanistan -- President Hamid Karzai on Friday condemned the reported burning and desecration of two dead Taliban fighters by U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan, and said he had ordered an investigation.

The president said he was taken aback after seeing an Australian television program's tape of the events on Wednesday, and warned that such incidents should not occur again. According to a transcript of the program, after they were burned, the bodies were used in what is described as a propaganda campaign to taunt the insurgents.

The Pentagon said Wednesday that the Army had begun a criminal investigation into the matter. At a news briefing in the capital on Friday, Karzai said he had also ordered his government to conduct an independent inquiry. "If that does not satisfy me, we will order higher investigations," he said.

The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, called the Afghan president to warn him of the developments. Karzai described the general as "very shaken and sad" at the news.

The burnings reportedly took place Oct. 1 in the village of Gombaz, 60 miles north of Kandahar, a former stronghold of the Taliban. The Muslim faith prohibits cremation and holds respect for human remains as a central tenet.

Karzai has denounced the attacks on Muslim clerics in the past, but on Friday found himself urging better behavior from those fighting the Taliban. "Regardless of what the enemies of Afghanistan are doing -- the killing of our clerics, teachers, government people -- we shall have a much higher, much better standard, and that standard should be kept by all of us," he said.

The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission also condemned the reported desecration. The action was "against the Islamic beliefs and traditions of Afghanistan and a violation of the Geneva Conventions and of international humanitarian law," it said.

The incident comes at a time when the Taliban have intensified their attacks in the south and east, in particular with suicide attacks and assassinations of government officials, teachers, doctors and clerics who support the U.S.-backed Karzai government.

In another such attack on Friday, a car bomb was detonated near a mosque in southern Afghanistan, killing a deputy provincial police chief and one of his bodyguards; an aid worker and an intelligence agent were slain in other violence, Afghan officials told The Associated Press.

Nafus Khan, the deputy police chief of Nimroz province, was parking his vehicle next to a mosque late Thursday in the regional capital, Zaranj, when he was killed by the car bomb, said Ghulam Dastaqir, the province's governor. One of his bodyguards was killed and another was injured. Dastaqir blamed the attack on Taliban rebels. An intelligence agent was killed while riding his bicycle home when a roadside bomb exploded in eastern Kunar Province, Assadullah Wafa, the provincial governor, told The AP. Kunar has seen some of the fiercest fighting between Taliban rebels and coalition forces.

On Thursday in the northern province of Faryab, gunmen on motorbikes shot to death an Afghan aid worker and wounded three others as they drove to Maymana, the provincial capital, Abdul Latif Ibrahimi, the provincial governor, told The Associated Press.

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