Afghans Probe Inmate Deaths

A team sent by President Hamid Karzai is in northern Afghanistan to investigate the reported deaths of hundreds of Taliban prisoners after the fall of the hard-line regime last year.

Led by Mawlavi Hanif Balkhi, an advisor to Karzai, the team flew to the city of Mazar-i-Sharif on Friday and was to travel east to Dasht-i-Leili outside the town of Sheberghan, where the prisoners were reportedly buried last year.

Balkhi told reporters he would also discuss security problems in the north with leaders of various factions, including Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord; Dostum’s ethnic Tajik rival, Ustad Atta; and leaders of the Hezb-i-Wahdat faction.

“And about the mass graves, we will investigate and then report to the central government,” Balkhi said.

The dispatch of the team by Karzai comes just days after the United States threw its support behind calls for the Afghan government to investigate the deaths of hundreds of Taliban fighters who surrendered to the U.S.-allied Northern Alliance last fall.

Newsweek magazine reported that as many as 1,000 prisoners died in shipping containers after surrendering to Dostum’s forces.

Sayed Noorullah, a deputy to Dostum, said Thursday that about 200 Talibs died while being transported in the containers, although most were badly wounded and weak from fighting. “There is no reason that deaths happened deliberately,” he said.

The European Union’s special envoy for Afghanistan said Friday that anyone guilty of war crimes in the north of the country after the fall of the Taliban must be brought to justice, regardless of the political repercussions. Francesc Vendrell said he had raised the issue with Dostum and stressed the importance of accountability.

“It is not the first time there has been this kind of massacre. We must put a stop to it,” he said.

Dostum, a deputy defense minister and Karzai’s special envoy for the northern region, has pledged to cooperate with the investigation.

The United Nations exhumed three bodies from a gravesite at Dasht-i-Leili for autopsy, which showed that the cause of death was probably suffocation.