Witnesses to Afghan war graves 'executed'

The UN is investigating reports that witnesses with possible information about alleged mass killings in northern Afghanistan have been executed.

There are claims they may have first been harassed, held and then tortured.

A team of representatives of the Afghan Human Rights Commission and the UN is now in the north of the country looking into the reports.

UN mission spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva told reporters in Kabul he wasn't sure when the group would issue its findings.

Hundreds of Taliban fighters, captured by the forces of northern warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum, suffocated to death late last year after they were crammed into unventilated metal shipping containers.

The fighters were meant to be transferred to a prison in Shibergan, but investigators for the US-based Physicians for Human Rights said hundreds died en route and ended up at a mass grave site nearby at Dasht-e-Leili. Dostum says the deaths were not intentional and has blamed them on combat injuries and disease.

The United Nations began preliminary investigations into the mass graves in April. Dostum and other northern warlords have said they would support an inquiry.

Almeida e Silva says the United Nations had received reports over the last six to eight weeks that Afghans "believed to have been in possession of information relating to the circumstances surrounding Dasht-e-Leili" had been subject to "harassment, arbitrary detention, torture and extrajudicial execution."

The United Nations had "raised its grave concerns" with the central government and with Dostum, who had pledged to look into the reports, he said.

"We felt that they were credible enough, that they were serious enough, and that they needed to be looked into," Almeida e Silva said.