Britain Sees No Need for Fortress Inquiry

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Friday that the British government sees no need for an inquiry into the deaths of hundreds of captured Taliban fighters at a fortress in northern Afghanistan.

“The situation there was absolutely terrible, everybody accepts that, that there was this slaughter of prisoners,” Straw told the British Broadcasting Corp.

“But this is not some easy Western circumstance. This was in the middle of a terrible situation where law and order had broken down.

“The idea that in the very difficult circumstances in Mazar-i-Sharif we can put in a judicial inquiry, I think, does not connect with the reality on the ground,” Straw said.

Hundreds of captives--most of them non-Afghan Taliban taken prisoner after the city of Kunduz fell--died in a three-day uprising at the Qala-i-Jangy fortress near the city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

Thousands of Northern Alliance fighters and heavy U.S. airstrikes were used to quell the uprising, which broke out when the prisoners stormed the armory and rose up against their alliance captors.

Several hundred prisoners, Northern Alliance troops and one CIA officer, Johnny “Mike” Spann, died in the fighting.

An Associated Press photographer on Wednesday saw that the arms of some corpses had been tied with cloth, and Northern Alliance fighters were seen removing bonds from the hands of victims before handing their bodies to the Red Cross.

Earlier this week, Amnesty International called for an investigation into the incident and said it was “ready to consider sending an observer to monitor an inquiry and to suggest forensic and other experts for it.”

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson later also called for an investigation.

“I am concerned about the reports we’ve had, and we don’t really know, in detail, what happened,” Robinson told the BBC on Friday. “But we do know that a lot of people got killed. . . . Therefore it is, I think, important to have an investigation.”

Amnesty International said responsibility for an inquiry lies with the U.S. and Britain and called for evidence to be preserved.