AFGHANISTAN: A team of UN officials confirmed the existence yesterday of three mass graves in central Afghanistan, believed to contain at least 35 adult and child victims of the Taliban regime.
A UN spokesman, Mr Manoel de Almeida e Silva, said members of a verification team had visited Bamiyan province, some 100 km north of Kabul, after being alerted to the graves by local officials.
The UN team "are returning to Kabul. They have been in the area and identified the sites and confirmed the existence of the sites," he said.
According to the secretary of local leader Mr Karim Khalili the bodies were found at three sites within 10 km of the provincial capital of Bamiyan city.
The dead bodies "lay very close to each other" in graves in the Zagran, Fad Masty, and Daudy Valleys, the secretary, Mr Abdul Satar, said. "A person who had seen Daudy Valley had counted around 35 to 36 bodies," he said, adding that the figure was likely to be higher.
Many of the bodies, which were discovered on Thursday, reportedly contained bullets and showed signs of gunshot injuries.
Local authorities have sealed off the grave sites, Mr Satar added.
"We have been trying to identify the bodies first. Later we will allow people to go there," he said.
Mr Satar said Khalili, the leader of the Shia Hezb-e-Wahdat - a faction of the ethnic Hazaras which controls most of Bamiyan province - had been holding talks with the UN delegation.
He said similar mass graves had been found in the past but the bodies had been reburied by locals. He accused the Taliban of being responsible for the deaths."All this had happened during the black era of the Taliban."
Earlier, Mr de Almeida e Silva said the bodies were believed to have been buried shortly before the collapse of the Islamic militia on December 7th.
"Saturday late afternoon, the discovery of three previously unknown mass graves near the Bamiyan airport were brought to the attention of the UN and the interim administration," he said.
"We were informed by representatives of the Hazara community that they believe the graves contain bodies of members of their community killed, by their estimate, one month before the fall of the Taliban."
The Shia Hazaras, who claim to be descendants of Genghis Khan, suffered particularly badly for their resistance to the Taliban regime during its five-year domination of Afghanistan.
When the Taliban seized control of the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998, several thousand Hazaras were gunned down in the streets and their homes in a two-day frenzy of bloodletting.
The Hazaras joined forces with the Northern Alliance which, backed by US air strikes, finally defeated the militia.
Bamiyan last year became the scene of one of the Taliban's most infamous acts when the militia destroyed two giant Buddha statues, reducing the 1,500-year monuments to rubble with explosives despite worldwide protests.
Meanwhile. at least two rockets were fired at the headquarters of multi-national peacekeeping troops in central Kabul early yesterday, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said. It was not clear who was responsible was for the attack, which caused no injuries or damage and came days after Afghan officials said a plot to destabilise the interim administration had been foiled.
Foreign troops were also the target of the foiled campaign of bombings aimed at killing the interim leader Mr Hamid Karzai.
Afghan officials said yesterday they would not rule out involvement of fundamentalist groups in the rocket attack, including remnants of the vanquished Taliban regime and followers of a one-time prime minister Mr Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.