KABUL, Aug 21: The Afghan government said on Wednesday it would cooperate with any inquiry into an alleged mass grave after reports that hundreds of Taliban prisoners of war suffocated to death in trucks driven by followers of a US-backed warlord.

The Newsweek magazine reported in its latest issue that some 1,000 Taliban prisoners may have died of asphyxiation in container trucks while being transferred by the US-backed Northern Alliance. The United States on Monday said it was looking into a Newsweek magazine report that.

“The Afghan Islamic Transitional Government clearly announces that it is ready to fully cooperate with human rights organizations and other related authorities in the investigation of this case and cases similar to this,” spokesman Omar Samad said in a statement to reporters.

“As an Islamic country which observes the human rights criteria we will seriously try to investigate this case.”

Defence Minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim earlier disputed the existence of a mass grave in the desert area of Dasht-i-Leili, in northern Afghanistan.

“I don’t believe that there is a mass grave containing hundreds of bodies in Dasht-i-Leili,” Fahim told reporters.

Fahim also said an investigation would be carried out into the claims but without specifying whether it would be conducted by local or national authorities or giving a timeframe.

“The ministry of defence has been in contact with the relevant authorities in the area and the province and is to carry out an exact investigation,” the minister said.

A witness quoted in a confidential United Nations memorandum obtained by the magazine put the death toll at 960.

The growing controversy has drawn attention to the role of US Special Forces who were coordinating efforts between the Northern Alliance strongman in the region, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, and US military forces.

A spokesman for Dostam, Faizullah Zaki, told the magazine that a number of people had died of suffocation, but he put the number at between 100 and 120.

“They suffocated. Died, not killed. Nobody killed anybody,” he reportedly said.

The prisoners were being transferred at the turn of the year from the northern city of Kunduz, where Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters had been forced to surrender after a lengthy siege, to a prison at Dostum’s Shebargan stronghold.

The Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which conducted a preliminary inquiry earlier this year, said in May that the site at Dasht-i-Leili was the most significant mass grave to be discovered in northern Afghanistan.

Jennifer Leaning, one of the PHR experts who had visited the site near the town of Shebargan, said that “human remains are very easy to find as one walks around”.

“We have spoken to many witnesses so there may well be a large number of bodies.”

The UN also said in May that its investigators had “discovered a large grave of recent origin” near Shebargan.

Three bodies that were exhumed appeared to be those of ethnic Pakhtoons, the main supporters of the Taliban, and its inquiry team had concluded that “the cause of death was due to suffocation”.

The US military has continued working with Afghan warlords since the fall of the Taliban late last year.

Washington has argued that it has little option but to team up with local powerbrokers as the central government led by President Hamid Karzai is still struggling to exert its influence beyond Kabul.

Deputy State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said in response to the Newsweek article that “we are looking into the circumstances surrounding the events that are reported in recent press coverage... through our embassy in Kabul”.

“We’ve stressed and continue to stress to Afghan authorities the importance of investigating allegations of human rights violations and war crimes,” he told reporters.—AFP