Taliban found in desert grave

The bodies of hundreds of Taliban prisoners massacred by Northern Alliance soldiers have been discovered by United Nations investigators in what is the worst atrocity so far of the Afghan war.

The UN says the prisoners were herded into metal freight containers after the capture of the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif last November and left to suffocate in the searing heat before being dumped in the desert.

The discovery throws new doubts over Tony Blair's decision last week to hand over all Taliban prisoners captured by the Royal Marines to the Afghan interim administration, which is now run by the Northern Alliance. Fresh executions are feared.

The bodies were found last week by human rights group Physicians for Human Rights who discovered a jumble of arms and legs and bodies crushed together by a bulldozer in the desert outside Mazar-i-Sharif.

The group's deputy director, Susannah Sirkin, said: "It's very disturbing to see initial evidence that some of these prisoners died of suffocation. We had only done a first look-see and could not do anything further as a private organisation, especially given the security situation in the country."

UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said his investigators found witnesses who said they saw Northern Alliance soldiers, holding their noses against the stench, dumping bodies from the containers into a burial pit last autumn.

"The absence of blunt-force trauma, sharp-force injury or firearm injury led the team to conclude that the cause of death was consistent with suffocation," said Mr Almeida.

He is calling on the present Afghan authorities, whose commanders led the attack on Mazar-i-Sharif last autumn, to give the UN co-operation in excavating the grave and finding out how many bodies it contains. Besides the one mass grave, the UN says two further sites have been found.

The freight containers have long been used as makeshift prisons throughout the country - and it is not the first time suffocation has been used as a method of execution by the Northern Alliance.

In 1997, the last time the Alliance forces captured Mazar-i-Sharif, they put more than 1,000 Taliban prisoners into the containers, drove them out into the same desert and left them to die in the summer heat.

The Taliban replied in kind a year later when it killed 6,000 men, women and children in a week-long orgy of violence after it recaptured the city.

The exiled Mazar-i-Sharif brigade of infantry warned last November that in memory of this massacre, revenge attacks against the Taliban should be expected.

Mazar-i-Sharif was the first Taliban city to fall to the Northern Alliance, with resistance collapsing last November after attacks by Alliance forces supported by US bombing.

The fall of the city saw the rout of the Taliban, ending six days later in the fall of Kabul. Soon afterwards, some Taliban prisoners rioted in Mazar-i-Sharif 's citadel, leading to hundreds of them being shot dead by their Northern Alliance guards. US air strikes also hammered the fortress, killing all but a handful of the prisoners.

Now the UN has demanded that the new government demonstrates its commitment to the rule of law by sealing off the site so that a full investigation can be made.

An inquiry could put the spotlight on the British Government. Last week, London revealed it will not keep any Taliban prisoners captured in Operation Snipe, now into its ninth day in the southern Afghan mountains. Instead, they will be handed to the Afghan authorities, despite their record of brutal mistreatment and executions.

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