Improper Handling of Koran Confirmed

The investigation looked into 13 allegations that the book had been treated improperly, and it determined that five incidents "could be broadly defined as mishandling" of a Koran, Army Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the Guantanamo prison commander, told reporters at the Pentagon. Two people have been punished in connection with two incidents, said Hood, who was in charge of the inquiry.

Hood's comments were the most detailed account to date of allegations that military guards and interrogators at the prison had mishandled Islam's holy book. The investigation is continuing.

Pentagon officials said international furor over an allegation published in Newsweek that a guard had flushed a Koran down a toilet prompted them to brief reporters about the interim findings. The magazine report about the treatment of the Koran was widely blamed for touching off deadly riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Newsweek retracted the report one week after publishing it.

An FBI report released Wednesday summarized one detainee's account of the incident in two interviews conducted in July 2002. (The report was released because of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union that sought to shed light on U.S. treatment of prisoners in Cuba.)

The guards "flushed a Koran in the toilet," the detainee alleged, according to the FBI report. "The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The guards still do these things."

That account differed from what the detainee told military investigators, Hood said.

Although the prisoner was never asked about the incident cited in the FBI document, Hood said, he was asked whether "he had seen the Koran defiled, desecrated or mishandled, and he allowed as how he hadn't. But he had heard guards -- that guards at some other point in time had done this.

"I do not believe [the military investigators] used that word, 'toilet,'" Hood said.

He said he could not explain why the detainee had told different stories to investigators from the military and the FBI, but he indicated that the wording might have been inexact.