September 4, 2002	Wednesday	Jamadi-us-Saani25,1423

WASHINGTON: The alleged massacre of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in the custody of a pro-US Afghan warlord appears to be developing into a major human rights controversy as militia commanders admitted the deaths.

Advocates calling for an investigation into the alleged killings have demanded a full forensic examination of the site where a mass grave was found in February this year. Human rights groups are urging the United Nations to hold a separate inquiry.

“We have no idea how many are buried at that grave site and no idea how they got there,” said John Heffernan, an investigator with Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights, who visited the area in north-central Afghanistan earlier this year.

“We need to first protect the site so that it’s not tampered with and second, we need to do an exhumation.”

Heffernan asked the United Nations and the Afghan authorities to jointly protect the site, as he feared that the perpetrators might try to remove evidence.

Gen. Rashid Dostum and three other senior commanders of the Northern Alliance admitted in a statement on Friday that some 200 Taliban prisoners may have suffocated late last year while being transported by truck in metal shipping containers from one jail to another.

The commanders now say some deaths happened during the prisoners’ transportation from Qalai Jangi to Sheberghan prison, but they were ‘unintentional’.

PHR released its report in May, and the grim story was first revealed in detail and reported in June, when a filmmaker formerly with the BBC screened a documentary about the alleged massacre before the European Union parliamentarians in Strasbourg, France.

Jamie Doran said the research that underpins his documentary suggested as many as 3,000 Taliban prisoners may have been massacred by the Northern Alliance forces when they captured the northern Taliban stronghold of Kunduz in November.

Pentagon officials insist that US soldiers were not aware of the alleged deaths.

Other observers who have interviewed alleged witnesses, aid workers and journalists in the region at the time have put the number of Taliban prisoners dead at least 1,000.