JALALABAD, Afghanistan, 12 May 2005 — Afghan troops were deployed on the streets of an eastern city yesterday after four people died and scores were injured in riots sparked by reports that US soldiers had desecrated the Qur’an at Guantanamo Bay. More than 70 people were injured, including six policemen, while dozens of vehicles and some 20 government and privates offices were damaged or set on fire, an interior ministry statement said.

Police in Jalalabad opened fire earlier yesterday to break up an enraged mob of several thousand people that torched the governor’s house, the Pakistani consulate and several foreign aid agencies, witnesses said. Workers in the Pakistani Consulate were forced to take refuge in a nearby house as protesters torched the building. “Uncountable people attacked the consulate, we took refuge in the neighbor’s house,” a Pakistani diplomat told AFP on condition of anonymity.

In a second day of protests, the crowd went on the rampage chanting slogans including “Death to America” as well as burning the Stars and Stripes and effigies of US President George W. Bush, witnesses said. Thousands more people joined protests in the nearby Afghan provinces of Khost, Laghman and Wardak, but they ended peacefully, the Interior Ministry said.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the riots showed the “inability” of the war-shattered country’s institutions to deal with such situations, but added the demonstrations at least meant democracy was flourishing. “Afghanistan’s institutions, the police, the army, are not ready to handle protest and demos,” Karzai said at NATO headquarters during an official visit to Brussels.

The US State Department said late Tuesday the Pentagon was investigating a report in Newsweek magazine that interrogators in Guantanamo, Cuba, kept copies of the Qur’an in toilets to annoy prisoners. The unrest in Jalalabad began as a peaceful protest by medical university students but numbers swelled to between 5,000 and 10,000 and the demonstration descended into violence, witnesses and a local police source told AFP.

Television footage showed hordes of men in traditional Afghan clothes hurling stones and sticks at buildings in the dusty streets of Jalalabad, 130 kilometers east of Kabul. “We support the right of people to voice their opinions, but violence takes away the people’s right of expression,” spokeswoman Lt. Cindy Moore said.

The US military, which leads a coalition of around 18,000 troops hunting Taleban militants three years after helping to topple the Islamic regime, said the Afghan National Army had been called in but US troops were not involved. “Police opened fire in the air to control the mob, and some people were injured. We do not know how many,” Jalalabad city police chief Abdul Rehman said.

“Initially the demonstrators were peaceful but then a group joined them and the mob turned violent,” he added. “They set fire to the governor’s office, they set fire to a number of police posts, they set fire to some NGOs, damaged a part of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan office, they also set fire to the Pakistani consulate. But things are under control.”

Pakistan’s Foreign Office summoned Afghanistan’s envoy to Islamabad yesterday and expressed “serious concern” after its consulate was attacked. The Afghan ambassador “regretted the incident and conveyed his government’s assurance to hold an investigation and tighten the security of the Pakistani mission in Afghanistan,” the statement said. Two people died at the scene and two others succumbed to their wounds in hospital, hospital’s chief director Fazel Mohammad Ibrahimi told AFP after a survey of the city’s three hospitals.

Another 53 injured people, four of them in a critical condition, were in hospital while many others were treated for light injuries at both, he said. The Interior Ministry later put the number of injured at 71.

The protesters also denounced Karzai, destroying a big portrait of him and shouting “Death to America’s allies” and “Death to Karzai” as well as “Death to Bush”. “We don’t want America, we don’t want Karzai, we want Islam,” they shouted. Cars were smashed, shops ransacked and government buildings torched. Protesters also looted the Pakistani Consulate, a witness said.

Karzai came to power on Oct. 9, 2004, in Afghanistan’s first democratic elections, but he has struggled to bring security to the largely lawless areas beyond the capital Kabul. With a general election due in September, he fears the West may abandon his country believing that good enough progress has already been made. “My request to you today is that you continue to stay with us after the parliamentary elections because if you don’t do that you will leave the work half way undone,” he told NATO’s governing political body. “It will take our country many years before we can stand on our own feet in real terms.”