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Annan Urges Taliban to Accept New York Museum's Offer
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has urged Afghanistan's Taliban to accept the offer by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to save statues, a UN spokesman said Friday.
Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar ruled on Thursday that all statues in Afghanistan should be destroyed because they are not Islamic.
UN spokesman Manoel de Silva said Annan received a phone call from the director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, who offered to send a team to Afghanistan to remove at all cost all moveable sculptures.
Silva said the UN chief asked his special representative on Afghanistan to press the Taliban to accept the offer and the special representative passed the offer on to the Taliban representative in Islamabad, capital of Pakistan on Friday.
The Taliban was reported on Friday to have used mortars and cannon to destroy the two renowned, rock-hewn Buddha statues in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, defying protests from around the world.
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