Newsweek’s unsourced allegation that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay “desecrated the Quran” has provoked a storm of Islamic fury across the world, according to al-Reuters: Protests across Muslim world over Koran report.

KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Angry protests raged across the Muslim world from Gaza to Indonesia on Friday over a report U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated the Koran, with calls for retaliation and a rising death toll.

Governments demanded investigations and thousands took to the streets in outrage over a Newsweek magazine report that interrogators at a U.S. military prison in Cuba had put the Muslim holy book on toilets, in at least one case flushing it down.

In Afghanistan, at least nine people were killed in protests over the report on Friday, bringing the country’s death toll to 16 this week in its worst anti-American demonstrations since the fall of the Taliban. …

In Gaza, several thousand Palestinians marched through a refugee camp in a protest organized by the Islamic militant group Hamas. Several hundred Palestinians also marched in the West Bank city of Hebron. “The Holy Koran was defiled by the dirtiest of hands, by American hands,” a protester shouted at the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza, where U.S. and Israeli flags were also burned.

The escalating violence prompted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to urge Muslims on Thursday to resist calls for violence, saying U.S. military authorities were investigating the Koran allegations. “Disrespect for the Holy Koran is abhorrent to us all,” she said.

Muslims consider the Koran the literal word of God, treating each book with deep reverence […and killing anyone who does otherwise… —ed.], and the episode has embarrassed the United States, which has sought closer ties with Muslim allies as it wages its war on terrorism.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, desecration of the Koran is punishable by death. …

“Demonstrations serve no purpose, we should do something practical. I am ready to blow myself up for the sake of my religion to embrace martyrdom,” said Mohammad Ghafoor, 18, a student protesting in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Newsweek, in its May 9 edition, quoted sources as saying that investigators probing abuses at the military prison had found that interrogators “had placed Korans on toilets, and in at least one case flushed a holy book down the toilet.”

UPDATE at 5/13/05 10:23:53 am:

No evidence to back reports of Quran’s desecration: US military. (Hat tip: Red Hot Cuppa Politics.)

Washington: The top US military officer, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that no evidence has been found yet to back allegations that a Quran was put down a toilet at the Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba to intimidate Muslim prisoners.

Myers told reporters yesterday that in an unconfirmed incident, a Guantanamo prisoner flushed pages from a Quran down a toilet in an effort to clog it. He said Army General Bantz J Craddock, head of US Southern Command, “has been in Guantanamo for the last couple of days digging into this issue to see if there was a time when the Koran was not respected.

”They have looked through the logs, the interrogation logs, and they cannot confirm yet that there was ever the case of the toilet incident,“ the General said. ”He did note a log entry, which they still have to confirm, where a detainee was reported by a guard to be ripping pages out of a Quran and putting them in a toilet to stop it up as a protest. But not where the US did it.”