The quashing of the rebellion at Qala-i-Jhangi fort in Afghanistan has raised questions on the circumstances surrounding the deaths of hundreds of Taliban fighters and the role played by British and US forces in the killings.
Mrs Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, yesterday stepped up the pressure on Britain and the US over the killings when she called for an inquiry into the deaths.
The human rights group Amnesty International also called for an inquiry, an appeal supported by several British politicians, but which neither Washington nor London has yet answered.
The Northern Alliance said it would allow human rights groups to investigate the treatment of Taliban prisoners. Mr Saeed Hasan Muslim, a representative of the Harakat-e-Islami party within the Northern Alliance, said that Amnesty would be welcome.
According to Northern Alliance forces, the fighting began Sunday after the rebellion of hundreds of armed, foreign pro-Taliban fighters - imprisoned in the fort near Mazar-e-Sharif. The incident already poses serious human rights issues, experts have underlined. The clearest is that of proportionality of action stipulated by the 1949 Geneva convention on rights in war time. "An urgent inquiry should look into what triggered this violent incident, including any shortcomings in the holding and processing of prisoners, and into the proportionality of the response by the United Front, US and UK forces," said Amnesty.
Article 51 of protocol A bans explicitly all indiscriminate attacks. A 1977 protocol to the Geneva convention makes it illegal to order that there shall be no survivors.
A more complex issue is whether the foreign volunteers should be regarded as prisoners, and therefore treated as such, or as fighters if at least some of them had taken up arms again.
These legal issues were brushed aside by a spokesman for the international coalition against terrorism, the American, Mr Kenton Keith. "This was not a massacre, this was a battle," he said.
The legal debate faces another larger question: did the Northern Alliance, the US and Britain not have an interest in the deaths of these pro-Taliban fighters, who no-one in the world wanted to see free, but whose trial would have been almost impossible to organise?
Amnesty International has urged Spain to set an example by standing by its refusal to extradite suspected al-Qaeda members to the US if they face execution or military trial. Mr Aznar's conservative government has said extradition to the US would not be possible if the suspects faced the death penalty or trial in secret military tribunals.