The United Nations went into abrupt reverse yesterday and said it no longer intended to release a report compiled by a team of UN officials who visited the site where a US warplane attacked a wedding party in Afghanistan on 1 July.

The change of tack by the UN was apparently the result of pressure from within its own hierarchy, particularly in Afghanistan itself, and from the US not to release the report that allegedly contradicts claims made by the US about the circumstances of the attack.

The controversy first erupted on Monday when it emerged that a first draft of the report written by the UN fact-finding team featured a number of potentially embarrassing allegations. They included the charge that the US had under-reported the numbers of people who had died and US soldiers had removed evidence from the site, suggesting a cover-up.

A UN spokesman said on Monday that a final draft would be made public within 24 hours. That had all changed by yesterday morning, however. Instead, a statement from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said the report would remain an internal document and would be shown only to the Afghan and American governments.

The row came as Kabul released fresh details of a bombing attack that was foiled when a man driving a car loaded with explosives was arrested in the capital on Monday. Officials said the man was a foreigner, which often means Arab or Pakistani in local parlance. By all accounts, the plot, if successful, could have been devastatingly effective. The plotter had allegedly planned to detonate himself and the car in an attack either on the president, Hamid Karzai, his top officials or on foreign targets such as the US embassy or the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force.

The Toyota was packed with large quantities of TNT and C4 explosives that could have caused widespread damage.

It would have been detonated by wires connected to two extra car batteries. "He mentioned Karzai as one of his natural targets," Amruallah Salhi, an Afghan security official, said of the suspect. "What we have gathered indicates he was a suicide bomber."

Though it was thwarted, the plot highlights the vulnerability of the new Afghan leadership.

In the statement, the UN Assistance Mission said: "The United Nations was not involved in either an inquiry or an investigation but simply responding to humanitarian needs as it does everywhere in the world." Sources confirmed the UN report had put the death toll at 80, compared to 48 deaths cited by the Afghan government. The Pentagon said it found only five graves there.

* The White House has set up an office devoted to improving the United States' image. The Office on Global Communications was unveiled yesterday just as a New York-based institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, urged Mr Bush to fix "America's shaky image abroad" before negative sentiment undercuts US interests.

© 2002 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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