| | Afghan police open fire at demonstration AFP
10/26/2009
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KABUL – Afghan police Monday opened fire and turned a water cannon on demonstrators angry about allegations that Western troops torched a Koran, wounding at least three people, officials and witnesses said.
Clashes erupted as police tried to prevent around 300 students, most of them men, from marching on parliament, the city's criminal investigation police chief, Sayed Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada, told AFP.
"Police fired at the crowd, one bullet hit me. I was closing my shop at the time," Sherullah, an 18-year-old man who suffered a bullet wound to his hip, told AFP from his hospital bed.
"They (policemen) were just firing. They were firing at the people," the wounded young man said.
Sayedzada denied that police fired towards the crowd, saying they only aimed their guns in the air. They also used water cannon, the police chief added.
But a doctor at the emergency ward of Ibn Sina hospital told AFP that at least three men suffering from "bullet wounds" had been admitted for treatment.
More than 15 police were also wounded in clashes between the angry mob and security forces, interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary told AFP.
An AFP reporter at the scene saw about three dozen people, mainly young students, herded into a police vehicle and taken away.
"We were demonstrating, we wanted to protest the burning of Koran by the foreign forces but the police came and started beating us," a young man, refusing to give his name, told AFP from the back of a police vehicle.
Another man, one side of his face covered in blood, said: "They beat us up, they fired at the people."
In a similar protest in Kabul on Sunday, demonstrators torched an effigy of US President Barack Obama and attacked police. Police responded by firing into the air to disperse the crowd.
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