KABUL, Jan 31 (PNS): As President Bush vowed to hunt terrorists across the globe, Afghan authorities were seeking explanations from the US military for the detentions of 27 prisoners seized last week in a Special Forces raid.
The Afghans claim that those taken into custody during the Jan. 23 raid north of Kandahar include anti-Taliban officials loyal to interim leader Hamid Karzai’s new government, among them the local police chief, his deputy and members of the district council.
The pre-dawn raid has emerged as one of the most controversial operations since the US military shifted gears from forcing the collapse of the Taliban regime to the hunt for surviving pockets of al-Qaida and Taliban fighters.
The Pentagon insists that Special Forces attacked a legitimate military target in the raid on an ammunition dump that intelligence analysts believed al-Qaida or Taliban forces were using. US troops killed 15 or 16 people and took 27 others prisoner after gunmen opened fire on them, the Pentagon said. One American soldier was wounded in the ankle.
Local Afghans have insisted that by the time the Special Forces arrived, Taliban renegades had handed over the weapons to pro-government figures, some of whom were among the dead.
A spokesman for Gov. Gul Agha in the southern city of Kandahar said Tuesday that the US military had promised to begin releasing some of the detainees in a few days. At the US base in Kandahar, Army spokesman Capt. Tony Rivers declined comment.
Yusuf Pashtun, Agha’s spokesman, said the Americans had been asked for clarification of the detainees’ status and the reasons they were being held.
Karzai says he will send a delegation to investigate the raid, which occurred in Uruzgan province - where he organized resistance to the Taliban before the Islamic militia collapsed last year following intense US bombing and attacks by the northern alliance.
Wearing his trademark green cape, the Afghan leader was a guest of honor in Washington and was applauded by Congress as he sat next to first lady Laura Bush for the president’s State of the Union speech.
Bush said that tens of thousands of terrorists still threaten the United States - ticking time bombs, set to go off - and promised to stalk them across the globe.
Offering chilling evidence of terrorists’ plotting, Bush said US forces in Afghanistan had found diagrams of American nuclear power plants hidden in terrorist hide-outs.
Earlier, testing themes for the speech, White House officials floated a figure that as many as 100,000 terrorists had trained in Afghanistan - far more than previously estimated. They later backed off, and Bush settled on tens of thousands.
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