KABUL, Afghanistan, June 7 — Nine days after the worst riots seen in the capital in years, Afghan officials revised the death toll to 17, and announced they had detained 250 people, 52 of whom had admitted involvement in the violence and looting.
In a rare news conference the head of the National Security Directorate, Amrullah Saleh, said that the May 29 riots were a spontaneous reaction to the traffic accident caused by an American military truck.
So far there was no proof of any political motivation or preplanning behind the violence, he said. Some of those detained belong to criminal gangs or political groups but investigations had not yet revealed any political motivation behind their actions.
"We cannot reject the possibility of anything yet," Mr. Saleh said. "There were some instigators, people from small bands or groups in Kabul, but so far we have not reached the final conclusion to be able to say a certain political organization was orchestrating the riot," he added.
Some 250 people have been detained since the riots, 140 of whom remain in detention, Mr. Saleh said. Of those, 52 have confessed to attacking public buildings and 10 of them were arrested for instigating the violence, he said.
He gave one example of a man who was seen setting fire to vehicles in the parking lot of Ariana Television, in the southwest of the city, then moving toward the Parliament building, where he was arrested as he was inciting people to violence.
The man belonged to a criminal gang, Mr. Saleh said: "He has given some more names of people who were cooperating with him, who had the same idea, and who had gathered because of the same action.
"Whether these people were receiving commands from any political group or criminal group has not come out yet from the investigation yet and it needs time," he added.
A Ministry of Interior official, Abdul Jabar Sabit, seemed to contradict the intelligence chief's findings, however, when he claimed in a separate news briefing that the riots had been organized.
"We think it was very coordinated, and it spread all over the city very quickly," Mr. Sabit said. People carried banners with political slogans on them and some men were arrested with leaflets encouraging people to protest on the day of the riots, he added.
Defending the performance of the police that day, Mr. Sabit said that the police did not fire on the crowd, and in some cases, rather than do so, abandoned their posts, which were then set on fire.
The head of the Ministry of Interior's criminal department, Abdul Wahab Khetab, said the death toll after the car crash and subsequent rioting was 17, and included one policeman. Some 194 people were treated in the city's hospitals for injuries received that day, but only 13 remained hospitalized a week later, he said.
Asked about reports that there were double or triple the official number of deaths that day, Mr. Saleh acknowledged that the death toll could be higher, saying the official count was only of those registered in the hospitals.
"We are an Islamic country, and based on our traditions, it is not obligatory to first take dead bodies to the hospitals to register them before burying them" he said.