BBC News Online: World: South Asia

Taleban calls for action on landmines

The ruling Taleban movement in Afghanistan has called for the United Nations to stop its opponents being supplied with landmines.

In a letter to the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, the Taleban's foreign minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawakel said that some countries were still providing the opposition leader, Ahmad Shah Masood, with mines in defiance of the Ottawa Convention, which prohibits their use.

But the opposition has accused the Taleban of also using mines and says it will give up using them when the Taleban does.

Thousands of Afghans are killed or maimed every year by mines planted during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service