Koran tested after claims against US troops in Afghanistan
ASADABAD, Afghanistan (AFP) — Investigators have sent burnt pages of a Koran to Kabul for tests to verify when they were set ablaze after allegations they were torched by US soldiers, Afghan police said.
The US military has rejected that its soldiers burnt the Muslim holy book during a raid in the eastern province of Kunar early Saturday but said it would investigate what happened.
The issue is highly sensitive in devout Afghanistan and has prompted angry protests.
"We have sent burnt pages of the Koran and ash samples to the capital to the interior ministry criminal investigation branch to find out if the pages were set on fire that night or earlier," Kunar police chief Abdul Jalal Jalal told AFP.
At a heated meeting in the Kunar capital Asadabad on Sunday, villagers from the Narang district where the raid occurred demanded an apology.
"If the perpetrators do not apologise... and if they are not brought to justice and punished for what they have done, we will stand against you, you will see an uprising," said one local, Azem Khan.
There are about 55,000 foreign soldiers here, about half of them from the United States, helping Afghan security forces fight back an insurgency by the extremist Taliban movement that was in government between 1996 and 2001.
