Straw: No inquiry

Foreign secretary Jack Straw has ruled out any inquiry into the killing of scores of Taliban prisoners in the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

Calls by Amnesty International and the International Red Cross for an investigation were backed by the Liberal Democrats on Wednesday.

Around 500 Taliban fighters who had previously surrendered to the Northern Alliance in Kunduz overpowered guards at the Qada-i-Jhangi fort outside Mazar-i-Sharif where they were being held, obtaining firearms in the process.

In the bloody fighting that followed, British and American special forces were involved in guiding repeated attacks by Western strike aircraft.

The battle ended after the deaths of scores of prisoners and around 40 Northern Alliance fighters, as well as the serious injury of five US soldiers which was caused when an American bomb went astray.

The charities requested an inquiry into the cause of the fighting, the proportion of the response by the Western troops and the Northern Alliance, and the treatment and processing of the prisoners. Findings and recommendations from the investigation should subsequently be made public, they said.

Speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Straw said: "The idea that at this moment you can have a judicial inquiry in the difficult circumstances of Mazar-i-Sharif is frankly not on."

He went on to say that the best way to safeguard human rights in Afghanistan would be to create a broad based multi-ethnic coalition to govern the country.

On Wednesday, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Menzies Campbell, said the United Nations should investigate the events.

"The United Nations should institute an immediate inquiry into the events at the prison in Mazar-i-Sharif. It appears that the Taliban prisoners set out to try and cause as much disruption as they could and were ready to take lives in the course of doing so.

"A response was legitimate but under international law it should have been proportionate and precise. The UN should satisfy itself that there was no breach of these requirements," said Campbell.