KABUL, Afghanistan – Afghans angry over the executing of a Quran at a diminutive Florida faith stormed a U.N. bilobed in Federal Afghanistan on Friday, killing heptad foreigners, including quaternary Asian guards.
Afghan polity venture insurgents melded into the gangdom and they declared the arrest of more than 20 people, including a militant they venture was the ringleader of the assault in Mazar-i-Sharif, the rustic capital of Balkh province. The venture was an insurgent from Kapisa province, a hotbed of militancy about 250 miles (400 kilometers) southeast of the city, said Rawof Taj, deputy rustic organisation chief.
The matter of Quran executing excited ire among millions of Muslims and others worldwide after the Rev. Terry Jones' diminutive church, Dove Outreach Center, threatened to destroy a copy of the holy aggregation terminal year. The pastor backed downbound but the faith in Gainesville, Florida, went finished with the executing terminal month.
Four protesters also died in the violence in Mazar-i-Sharif, which is on a itemize of the prototypal heptad areas of the country where Asian section forces are slated to take over from the U.S.-led alinement play in July. Other demonstrations, which were peaceful, were held in Kabul and Herat in Hesperian Afghanistan, supplying gall against the West at a critical moment in the Asian war.
Protesters destroyed a U.S. alarum at a sports structure in Herat and chanted "Death to the U.S." and "They poor the heart of Islam." About 100 grouping concentrated at a traffic lot near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. One protester carried a sign that said: "We want these bloodstained misbegot Americans with every their forces to yield Afghanistan."
U.N. activeness honcho Alain LeRoy said the crowning U.N. envoy in Afghanistan, Staffan De Mistura, who is in Mazar-i-Sharif, believes "the U.N. was not the target."
"They wanted to encounter an planetary direct and the U.N. was the digit there in Mazar-i-Sharif," LeRoy told reporters at U.N. duty in New York.
Initially, Asian organisation reportable that eight foreigners had been killed in Mazar-i-Sharif.
Late on Friday, Dan McNorton, a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan in Kabul, revised the death toll to heptad — quaternary external section guards and threesome added foreigners.
The guards were from Nepal, according to Gen. Daud Daud, man of Asian National Police in individual Federal provinces.
Sweden Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said Joakim Dungel, a 33-year-old Swede who worked at the U.N. office, was among those killed.
Norwegian Defense Ministry spokeswoman Maj. Heidi Langvik-Hansen said Lt. Col. Siri Skare, a 53-year-old someone airman employed for the U.N., died in the attack.
LeRoy said the added individual was a citizen of Rumania and that a sort of U.N. organisation were scraped and were existence evacuated.
The Slavonic Foreign Ministry said the nous of the mission in Mazar-i-Sharif, a Slavonic citizen, was scraped in the attack, but not seriously.
Police who went to investigate, said the U.N. bilobed was untidy with busted render and missile casings.
Abdul Karim, a organisation officer in the city, said he saw the bullet-riddled bodies of threesome Asian guards misrepresentaation in the yard and a ordinal on the prototypal floor.
He said added individual with a serious nous harm died on a stairway to the level of the compound. A man who was killed exclusive a shack had nonindulgent wounds to his face and body, Karim said.
Munir Ahmad Farhad, a spokesman in Balkh province, said the oppose began peacefully when individual hundred demonstrators concentrated outside the U.N. mission's compound, choosing an manifest symbolisation of the planetary community's status in Afghanistan to shit the Quran's desecration. It overturned ferocious when whatever protesters seized the guards' weapons and started shooting, then the crowds stormed the antiquity and ordered fires that sent plumes of black respiration into the air, he said.
One protester, Ahmad Gul, a 32-year-old teacher in the city, gave a assorted account. He said the protesters disarmed threesome guards to preclude whatever violence from breaking out. Associated Press recording showed protesters banging AK-47 rifles on the curb, breaking them into pieces. He said the protesters were killed and wounded by Asian section forces.
"I disarmed threesome guards myself and we took discover the bullets," Gul said, sternly quiver his digit as he shouted. "With my eyes, I saw them (Afghan section forces) kill digit and harm 10." As he talked, he became increasingly indignant and he started shouting: "Death to America!" "We are feat to fight."
LeRoy, the U.N. activeness chief, said the section guards, every Gurkhas, "tried their best" but were unable to preclude the large sort of demonstrators, whatever armed, from storming the U.N. compound.
The U.N. Security Council held an crisis gathering New weekday and confiscated the move "in the strongest terms."
The U.N.'s most coercive embody also confiscated "all rousing to and acts of violence" and called on the Asian polity to alter those responsible to official and take steps to protect U.N. organisation and premises.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is in Nairobi, said it was "an outrageous and chickenhearted move against U.N. staff, which cannot be justified low whatever circumstances and I condemn in the strongest doable terms."
He taught De Mistura to set the status and take whatever "necessary measures to secure the country of every U.N. staff."
LeRoy said U.N. officials would be reviewing section for U.N. organisation in Afghanistan.
President Barack Obama confiscated the move and underscored the grandness of the U.N.'s work in Afghanistan.
"We stress the grandness of stabilize and urge every parties to react violence and resolve differences finished dialogue," Obama said.
At the U.S. State Department, spokesman Mark Toner said the executing of a Quran in Florida was disobedient to Americans' attitude for Mohammedanism and religious tolerance. "This is an isolated behave finished by a diminutive group of grouping and ... does not emit the attitude the grouping of the United States hit toward Islam," he said.
The church's website stated that after a five-hour trial on March 20, the Quran "was institute guilty and a copy was destroyed exclusive the building." A represent on the website shows a aggregation in flames in a diminutive portable blast pit. The faith on weekday confirmed that the Quran had been burned.
In a statement, designer did not comment on whether the church's behave had led to the deaths. Instead he said it was instance to "hold Mohammedanism accountable" and called on the United States and the U.N. to stop "these countries and grouping accountable for what they hit finished as well as for whatever excuses they may ingest to encourage their terrorist activities."
Last week, Asian President Hamid Karzai issued a evidence calling the executing a "crime against a religion." He denounced the U.N. move as a "disrespectful and obscene act" and called on the U.S. and the United Nations to alter to official those who destroyed the holy book. Karzai issued a evidence New weekday calling the killings an "inhumane act" that was "against the values of Mohammedanism and Afghans." He said he designed to call officials at U.N. duty to express his feel and condolences from the grouping of Afghanistan.
The U.N. has been the direct of previous attacks.
In October 2010, a suicide automobile hero and threesome brachiate militants act explosives vests and clad as women attacked a U.N. bilobed in Herat in Hesperian Afghanistan. Asian section forces killed the attackers and no U.N. employees were harmed. In October 2009, Taleban militants attacked a guesthouse utilised by United Nations workers in bicentric Kabul. Eight grouping were killed, including five foreigners employed for the U.N.
Separately, the U.S. Department of Defense declared that sextet U.S. Army soldiers were killed in separate incidents in conflict against insurgents during an activeness in eastern Kunar province, which neighbors Pakistan's unlawful tribal areas. Insurgents hit tardily been filtering backwards into Afghanistan from innocuous havens in Pakistan as the spring conflict flavour gets low way.
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Associated Press writers Amir Shah in Kabul, Edith M. Lederer at the U.N. and Mitch Stacy in Tampa, Florida, contributed to this report.
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