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Mass graves reported in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- U.N. officials have traveled to Afghanistan's Bamiyan province to investigate reports of three graves containing human bodies.

Members of Bamiyan's Hazara community told the United Nations they believe the people were killed one month before the Taliban fled in December, U.N. spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said.

The Hazara contacted the United Nations late Saturday and requested the international body collect evidence before the community exhumes the bodies and buries them properly. The U.N. mission is due back in Kabul on Sunday afternoon, where the members are expected to give a briefing on their findings.

Bamiyan province, about 128 kilometers (80 miles) northwest of Kabul, shot to international prominence when the Taliban destroyed two huge Buddhist statues in 2001. The Taliban regarded the statues as false idols and ordered their destruction.

One of these Buddhist statutes was 1,500 years old.

The region was the site of intense fighting between Taliban troops and Northern Alliance soldiers. U.S. forces secured two compounds March 27 in Bamiyan, taking al Qaeda suspects into custody and questioning a group of Taliban prisoners.

The Taliban, a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist militia that ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until last year's U.S.-led military campaign, have been accused of massacres of the largely Shiite Hazara population before.

A 1998 U.N. report accused the Taliban of killing an estimated 3,000 people, mostly Hazaras, after capturing the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif. Surviving Hazaras were warned to practice the Sunni tradition of the Taliban if they wanted to survive, the report said.

The report accused Taliban fighters of carrying out "widespread random and indiscriminate killings without warning" in Mazar-e Sharif.