Koran abuse: Newsweek may have erred in report

‘‘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,’’ editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine’s latest issue, due to appear on US newsstands on Monday.

The report has sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world — from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza.

The May 9 report quoted unnamed sources as saying that military investigators probing abuse at the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, found that interrogators had placed copies of the Koran on toilets and ‘‘in at least one case, flushed a holy book down the toilet’’.

Newsweek said a Pentagon spokesman told the magazine late last week that the story was wrong and that the military has found no credible evidence to support separate allegations of Koran desecration made by released detainees.

The US military opened an investigation into the charges while top US officials urged Muslims to resist calls for violence, stating disrespect for the holy book would not be tolerated.

A group of Afghan Muslim clerics had threatened on Sunday to call for a holy war against the US in three days unless it hands over military interrogators reported to have desecrated the Koran.

The clerics in the northeastern province of Badakhshan said they wanted US President George W. Bush to handle the matter honestly ‘‘and hand the culprits over to an Islamic country for punishment’’.

‘‘If that does not happen within three days, we will launch a jihad against America,’’ said a statement issued by 300 clerics, after meeting in the main mosque in the provincial capital, Faizabad.