CAIRO, Oct 29: The Imam of Al-Azhar told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Monday he was opposed to the US strikes on Afghanistan.

“It is wrong to punish a whole people for the Sept 11 attacks on the United States which prompted the US retaliatory offensive,” Sheikh Mohamed Sayyed Tantawi was quoted as saying by the Egyptian news agency, MENA.

The punishment should be inflicted on the “criminals” responsible for the attacks, which Washington has pinned on Osama bin Laden, who is under the protection of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, he said.

Sheikh Tantawi was speaking at a meeting of Al-Azhar’s religious leaders with Mubarak during the inauguration of a new conference centre in the religious complex in Cairo.

He repeated his view that the Sept 11 suicide attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon using hijacked airliners were “an odious crime which cost the lives of thousands of innocents.”

But he added that “the state which was attacked must seek out the criminals and bring them to justice.”

On Oct 9, two days after the strikes on Afghanistan were launched, Mubarak said he supported “every US measure aimed at wiping out terrorism”.

But he expressed the hope that the attacks would spare civilian lives. —AFP