Dear Editor,

The Taliban of Afghanistan are a gang of mediaeval criminals posing as Muslims. These people have been perpetrating much wickedness and crimes on women and ordinary people and have been projecting a false image of Islam to the world.

The most barbarous and un-Islamic evil the Taliban committed was when they destroyed the statues of Buddha. Those great statues were kept unharmed by generations of Muslims and were part of the heritage of mankind, just as the Pyramids and the many statues of Egyptian kings and gods are.

Many Muslim states, and countries influenced by the Buddha's teachings such as Japan, China, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Europe and America pleaded with the Taliban to desist from their barbarism and offered money to save the statues. Some offered to remove the statues but the Taliban refused. Sri Lanka even offered to buy the rubble after the statues were destroyed but even this they refused, contemptuously ignoring the religious sensibilities of others.