JURIST - Paper Chase: Nine more killed in Afghan rioting despite US denials of Gitmo Koran desecration

[JURIST] Nine more people were killed in spreading anti-US riots across Afghanistan [BBC report] Friday despite new US assurances that American authorities would not tolerate disrepect for the Koran at Guantanamo Bay or anywhere else and Pentagon insistence that the reported desecretion of the Muslim holy book never happened at the detention camp and that Afghan rioting earlier in the week [JURIST report] was in fact unrelated to the alleged Gitmo incident. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a Senate committee [VOA report; State Department transcript] Thursday that Americans found disrespect for the Koran abhorrent and that the allegations made in a recent edition of Newsweek magazine about US personnel at Guantanamo Bay were being investigated. Meanwhile General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the only incident they had turned up similar to US troops placing the Koran on toilets, at one time flushing the book down, was evidence in the call log of a detainee's effort to clog a toilet by stuffing Koran pages down it in protest. Myers also insisted that the rioting was not related to the reported desecration at all, but was but "more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his cabinet are conducting in Afghanistan." VOA has more.

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