US/CUBA: The first group of al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners arrived at the US naval base in south-eastern Cuba under heavy guard last night, flown from Afghanistan for indefinite detention.
An air force cargo plane carrying 20 prisoners landed at the US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, nearly 27 hours after leaving Kandahar.
In Kabul, Northern Alliance troops withdrew from the streets in compliance with a directive from the new interim government, as the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, announced a visit to Afghanistan next Tuesday.
Mr Powell, who will also visit India and Pakistan to try to defuse their stand-off before heading to Japan for an Afghanistan reconstruction conference, said he would like to discuss with the interim leader, Mr Hamid Karzai, how best to aid the country's reconstruction.
Meanwhile, the interim government's plan to rid the streets of armed men appeared to be reaching fruition.
General Din Mohammad Jurhat, a senior security official in the interior ministry, said around 5,000 to 6,000 Northern Alliance soldiers had left the city over the past three days.
"More will leave Kabul in a week," he said. "Another five or six thousand divided between the police and the military will remain."
A senior aide to the country's former king Mohammed Zahir Shah welcomed the pull-out.
However, in a sign of the lawlessness still prevailing in many parts of the country, the US Marine base at the airport in Kandahar, the former bastion of the Islamic regime, came under fire late on Thursday.
Attackers, on foot and under cover of darkness, penetrated the airport's perimeter prompting US troops to respond with machine gun and small arms fire.
The attack came eight minutes after the C-17 transport plane took off for Guantanamo.US officers in Kandahar insisted the exchange of fire between Marines based at the airport and "enemy forces" was not related to the flight.
US planes meanwhile continued bombing three former suspected al-Qaeda bases in eastern Afghanistan, prompting Pakistanis living close to the border to flee their homes, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) reported.
The 20 shackled prisoners are the first of at least 371 detainees captured in Afghanistan to be shipped away from the region. Many are considered dangerous and possibly suicidal followers of Osama bin Laden.
The prisoners were shackled and under heavy guard and at least one was sedated during the flight.
Military police and US Marines were waiting to escort them at the airstrip on the western side of Guantanamo Bay. They planned to put them on a ferry and take them across the bay to the hastily-built prison compound called "Camp X-Ray" because of its bare-bones structure. Described by one military spokesman as "the worst of the worst", the captives were the first group of prisoners to be shipped out of the war region.
The US Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, said the US did not plan to treat them as prisoners of war, a distinction that requires handling in a manner consistent with the Geneva convention.
In Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it would be granted access to the prisoners in Cuba.
In Singapore, a suspected Islamic group with al-Qaeda links had planned to target US personnel and naval vessels before police struck and arrested key members of the gang, the city-state's home affairs ministry said.