KABUL - Afghan president Hamid Karzai has expressed displeasure at the way Newsweek magazine handled a story on alleged desecration of the Koran, his spokesman Javed Ludin said Monday.
"We express in the strongest terms our disapproval of Newsweek's approach to reporting which allowed them to run the story without proper examination beforehand," Ludin said in a statement.
"We would like to emphasize the need for a professional and sensitive approach to journalism particularly with regards to reporting on potentially sensitive issues," it said.
The report in the May 9th edition of the US news magazine sparked demonstrations that left at least 14 people dead in Afghanistan.
Newsweek reported that an upcoming inquiry report by the US military would reveal that investigators had found that US interrogators at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a Koran down a toilet.
The magazine said on Sunday its story might be wrong.
It explained that when asked again, the senior US official who had remembered seeing details of the Koran incident in a report could no longer be sure of the event.
Ludin welcomed the magazine's latest statement "because it clarifies an issue of significant importance and sensitivity for Muslims across the world."
The violence in Afghanistan was the worst to hit the country since Karzai took office after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001.
Angry mobs torched government and private property, a foreign aid office, and the Pakistani consulate in the eastern city of Jalalabad.
While US authorities have not denied outright that incidents involving the Koran have occurred at Guantanamo, General Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that no evidence had been found yet to back the allegations.
Karzai on Saturday said the originally peaceful protests against alleged the Koran abuses had been exploited by the "enemies of peace" to undermine parliamentary elections and plans to reconcile with remnants of the ousted Taliban regime.
05/16/2005 15:09 GMT