Seven foreign employees of the United Nations were killed today in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif after protesters over-ran their compound, police said, in what looks to be the deadliest ever assault on the UN in Afghanistan.
Two of the dead were beheaded by attackers who also burned parts of the compound and climbed up blast walls to topple a guard tower, said Lal Mohammad Ahmadzai, a police spokesman for the northern region.
The United Nations later confirmed that seven of its international employees - including both UN staff and security guards - had been killed in the attack.
"Three international UNAMA (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan) staff members were killed, and four international armed security guards were killed," said Dan McNorton, spokesman for the UN mission in Afghanistan.
Mr McNorton said no UNAMA Afghan national staff had been killed, but the investigation into the incident was still ongoing.
Officials at United Nations offices in New York have said the final toll could be as high as 20.
Over a thousand protesters had flooded into the streets of the normally peaceful city after Friday prayers to denounce the burning of Islam's holy book, the Koran, by a US pastor, and after two or three hours violence broke out.
Police fired into the air in an unsuccessful bid to control the crowd.
A police source, who declined to be named, said protesters had stormed into the compound where they attacked the victims. The chief of the mission in the city was wounded but survived, and the dead included employees of Norwegian, Romanian and Swedish nationalities, he added.
Russia called on the Afghan government and international forces to "take all necessary measures" to protect UN workers in a statement issued by the foreign ministry after the attack.
Staffan De Mistura, the top UN diplomat in Afghanistan, has flown to Mazar-i-Sharif to handle the situation personally.
If the death toll given is correct, it would make it the deadliest attack on the United Nations in Afghanistan. The worst previous attack was an insurgent assault on a guesthouse where UN staff were staying in October 2009. Five employees were killed and nine others wounded.
It was not clear if today's killings had any direct link to the insurgency, or were simply a product of broader anti-Western sentiment.
Mazar-i-Sharif has remained relatively peaceful as the insurgency gathers force in other parts of the north, and was recently chosen as one of the first areas for a transition of security from Nato troops to Afghan forces.
Long-standing anger over civilian casualties has been heightened by the Koran burning and the recent publication of gruesome photographs of the body of an unarmed Afghan teenager killed by US soldiers.
The Christian preacher Terry Jones, who after international condemnation last year cancelled a plan to burn copies of the Koran, supervised the burning of the book in front of a crowd of about 50 people at an obscure church in Florida on Sunday, according to his website.
The Koran burning was denounced by Afghan president Hamid Karzai and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari.
Thousands of demonstrators marched through western Herat city and around 200 in Kabul to protest against the same incident, but there was no violence at either demonstration.
Reuters