Appeal for Bamiyan Buddha replicas

A Buddhist organisation in Sri Lanka has called for public donations to build replicas of the two giant Buddha statues recently destroyed by the Taleban authorities in Afghanistan.

The Sri Lankan group, the Maha Bodhi Society, says it will start with a scaled-down replica of the larger statue -- a fifty-one metre high standing Buddha, carved into a cliff near the Afghan town of Bamiyan more than fifteen-hundred years ago.

The two figures were blown up by the Taleban earlier this month as anti-Islamic, despite widespread international condemnation.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service