AFGHANISTAN: Hundreds of tearful Afghan civilians and grim-looking officials braved the summer heat at a hill-top mausoleum in Kabul yesterday to see the coffin of former queen Homaira laid to rest, her frail husband looking on.
Troops of the International Security Assistance Force for Kabul swept the area for mines before the motorcade swept in from the airport where President Hamid Karzai and former king Mr Mohammad Zahir Shah met the plane bringing Homaira from Rome. Afghan soldiers stood guard.
Homaira died in Rome last week aged 84. Her coffin wrapped in the black, green and red Afghan flag arrived on an Italian plane to a modest reception, attended by about 100 royalists and fellow ethnic Pashtuns.
Women fashionably dressed in Western clothes and wearing sun glasses wept as a military band played a dirge.
Mr Zahir Shah (87) showed little emotion, occasionally waving to admirers as he followed the coffin, carried by four soldiers, to a car.
Her body was taken to the war-damaged mausoleum in the centre of town where the former king's father is buried.
Mr Karzai and Mr Zahir Shah sat in the heat upstairs as the coffin was carried below to the tomb.
"She was the mother of the nation," royal spokesman Mr Hamid Sadiq said. "She supported the rights of women and that was her interest - to give the women of Afghanistan their rights."
Homaira Shah had lived in Rome since 1973, the year the king was overthrown in a bloodless coup while on holiday.
Meanwhile, Afghan authorities yesterday ruled out sabotage in a deadly munitions depot explosion in the southern border town of Spin Boldak, saying negligence caused the chain of blasts that killed and wounded dozens of people.
Residents yesterday told Pakistani aid workers that more than 30 people were killed, including women, children and Afghan soldiers.