THE incendiary account of US interrogators flushing a copy of the Koran down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay may not, after all, be true, the magazine behind the claim said.

The report in last week’s Newsweek sparked riots in Afghanistan that spread across the Muslim world, leading to the deaths of at least 14 people and injuries to more than 120.

In this week’s edition the magazine backtracks. “We regret that we got any part of our story wrong and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the US soldiers caught in its midst,” Mark Whitaker, the Editor, wrote in an editorial.

The report last week said that the claims about the Koran, which previously had been aired by other news organisations, would be validated by an inquiry report into the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. It was based on conversations with a senior American official who said that he had seen mention of the Koran incident in the report.

However, on checking with the source since publication, Newsweek said that the official no longer could be sure that they had remembered correctly.

When told of Newsweek’s new stance, Lawrence DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman, raged: “People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said.”

The Pentagon has been under mounting pressure to get to the bottom of the allegations as anti-American riots spread from Gaza to Kabul to Jakarta. The allegations also drew an official protest from Saudi Arabia, one of America’s most crucial allies in the Islamic world.

Yesterday, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest opposition organisation, demanded that the US apologise, as did Islamic leaders in Bangladesh. In Beirut, Lebanon’s top Sunni Muslim cleric called for an international investigation.

The episode has threatened to give Washington its biggest headache overseas since the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib.

Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, said that mistreatment of the Koran was “abhorrent” to right-thinking Americans.

Despite Newsweek’s about-turn, the Pentagon has yet to state officially that no mistreatment of the Koran by interrogators took place at Guantanamo Bay, where the US has held 600 detainees in legal limbo for more than three years.

General Richard Myers Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that no evidence has yet been found to support the claims. Such allegations had been raised before Newsweek’s report. A lawyer for some Guantanamo inmates has blamed the attempted suicide of 23 of them in August 2003 on a US guard stamping on the Koran.

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