ISLAMABAD, Oct 9 (DPA) At least 10 to 20 per cent of the bombs dropped by the US-led forces on Afghanistan will not explode and will have to be diffused after the conflict ends in the war-torn country, the United Nations warned today.
Making the statement, UN spokesperson for Afghanistan in Islamabad Stephanie Bunker said the UN has also appealed for protection of the civilian population in Afghanistan following the death of four aid workers in the US air strikes on Monday night.
Bunker said that four staff members of the United Nations-funded Afghan Technical Consultants (ATC) were killed on Monday night.
Four others were wounded.
The office of the mine-clearing agency, in Yakatoot, three kilometres from capital Kabul, was destroyed by a bomb on Monday night.
Yakatoot is engaged in demining work in war-battered Afghanistan.
Only one third of the known-mined areas in Afghanistan have been cleared so far.
Tajikistan will let no US troops on its soil DUSHANBE, Oct 9 (Reuters) Ex-Soviet Tajikistan placed limits on its agreement to help US-led strikes in neighbouring Afghanistan today, saying it had no plans to allow US troops on its territory.
Tajikistan and other Central Asian states have become the focus of considerable speculation as Washington moves into the third day of its bombing campaign to root out Osama bin Laden, blamed for last months attacks on the United States.
"American land troops have not and are not passing through Tajikistan to Afghanistan," Amirkul Azimov, secretary of Tajikistans Security Council, told reporters.
"American specialists are here and are considering how to distribute humanitarian aid...The question (of land troops) has not been considered." Yesterday, Tajikistan made its first government statement on the US campaign, expressing readiness "to open its airspace to the US airforce and, should it prove necessary, its airports for carrying out measures against terrorism".
Security chiefs of Tajikistan, Russia and four ex-Soviet republics were wrapping up talks in Dushanbe on tightening border security ahead of any influx of Afghan refugees.
The other states, part of a collective security treaty tied to the Commonwealth of Independent States are the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus and Armenia.
Tajikistan is the poorest of the ex-Soviet republics, with a 1,300-km (815-mile) long border with Afghanistan, far longer than either Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan.
It hosts up to 20,000 Russian troops to maintain stability after a 1992-97 civil war pitting the secular government against Islamist opponents.
Azimov said Tajikistans air bases would be used for distributing humanitarian aid but not necessarily for future US action in Afghanistan, where bin Laden has been sheltered by the hardline Muslim Taliban movement.
Pak police shoot dead 3 protesters QUETTA (Pakistan), Oct 9 (Reuters) Three anti-US protesters were shot dead today by Pakistani police in the town of Kuchlak near the Afghan border as they tried to storm a bank, police said.
A crowd demonstrating against the US-led strikes on neighbouring Afghanistan attacked a bank and tried to storm a police station, prompting police to fire into the air as well as into the crowd, police said.
Many people were reported to have been arrested and several injured in a second day of violent anti-US demonstrations in the western Pakistani province of Baluchistan.
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