KABUL, Aug 25: Hundreds of suspected militants held by US-led forces in Afghanistan since the overthrow of the Taliban in late 2001 will be tried in Afghan courts under local laws, a US army spokesman said on Wednesday.
Major Scott Nelson said Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Lt-Gen David Barno, the overall commander of US-led troops in Afghanistan, agreed the plan earlier this month.
"The people that are still being held here will be tried in Afghan courts and under the Afghan justice system," Nelson told a regular press briefing.
He said the detainees posed no major threat and the reason why the US military was holding them for a longer time was because Afghanistan lacked prisons and its judicial system was being rebuilt.
Hundreds of suspected militants, of many nationalities, have been caught by the US military since then and are being kept at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and in its detention centres in Afghanistan.
Former prisoners released from US jails in Afghanistan say they were tortured and abused while in custody, raising concerns that scandal over the mistreatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison earlier this year was not an isolated episode.
Nelson said a report on a US military investigation into alleged abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan would be released "very, very soon". -Reuters
