It was former Pakistan cricket captain-turned-politician Imran Khan who highlighted the Newsweek magazine's report about the alleged desecration of the Quran which led to anti-US rioting in Afghanistan killing 15 people, the weekly reported.

"The spark was apparently lit at a press conference held on Friday, May 6, by Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricket legend and strident critic of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Brandishing a copy of that week's Newsweek (dated May 9), Khan read a report that US interrogators at Guantánamo prison had placed the Quran on toilet seats and even flushed one," the weekly said in its latest issue.

The report came even as The International Herald Tribune reported that "Newsweek magazine said today that it might have erred in reporting that American interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba might have desecrated detainees' copies of the Quran".
 
The latest story in the weekly quoted the former cricketer as saying: "This is what the US is doing...desecrating the Quran."

"His remarks, as well as the outraged comments of Muslim clerics and Pakistani government officials, were picked up on local radio and played throughout neighbouring Afghanistan. Radical Islamic foes of the US-friendly regime of Hamid Karzai quickly exploited local discontent with a poor economy and the continued presence of US forces, and riots began breaking out last week," Newsweek said.

The magazine explained the circumstances that led to its assertions about the alleged desecration of the Islamic holy book at the Guantanamo prison.

"At Newsweek, veteran investigative reporter Michael Isikoff's interest had been sparked by the release late last year of some internal FBI e-mails that painted a stark picture of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo.

"Isikoff knew that military investigators at Southern Command (SouthCom, which runs the Guantánamo prison) were looking into the allegations. So he called a long time reliable source, a senior US government official who was knowledgeable about the matter. The source told Isikoff that the report would include new details that were not in the FBI e-mails, including mention of flushing the Quran down a toilet," the magazine said.

"A SouthCom spokesman contacted by Isikoff declined to comment on an ongoing investigation, but Newsweek national security correspondent John Barry, realising the sensitivity of the story, provided a draft of the Newsweek Periscope item to a senior defence official, asking, 'Is this accurate or not?'

"The official challenged one aspect of the story: the suggestion that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, sent to Gitmo by the Pentagon in 2001 to oversee prisoner interrogation, might be held accountable for the abuses. Not true, said the official (the Periscope draft was corrected to reflect that). But he was silent about the rest of the item. The official had not meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom report," it said.

"Given all that has been reported about the treatment of detainees - including allegations that a female interrogator pretended to wipe her own menstrual blood on one prisoner - the reports of Quran desecration seemed shocking but not incredible," it said.

--Indo-Asian News Service