BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan — Two U.S. Marines died Sunday and five others were injured when their helicopter crashed in a rugged mountain region while on a resupply mission.
There was no immediate information of the cause of the crash, although Marines spokesman 1st Lt. James Jarvis said there was no initial indication of hostile file. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on U.S. television that the cause initially appeared to be a mechanical failure.
Initial reports said several of the survivors were severely injured, but a later Defense Department statement said none of the injuries were life-threatening.
The survivors were flown from the crash site to the Bagram air base outside the capital Kabul and then on to an undisclosed location for treatment, said Capt. Tom Bryant, a U.S. Army spokesman at Bagram.
A defense department official said on condition of anonymity that the treatment location was "within the Afghanistan theater of operations."
The CH-53E Super Stallion and another helicopter took off from Bagram to resupply U.S. forces at an undisclosed location, the military spokesmen said.
Bryant said the crash site was about 60 kilometers (40 miles) south of Bagram. That could be in mountains where U.S. special operations forces are believed to have been pursuing Taliban and al-Qaida renegades.
Bryant would not say what kind of U.S. forces were being resupplied or what cargo was on board, but said that such missions were a "normal occurrence."
The worst single casualty toll for U.S. forces in the Afghanistan campaign came Jan. 9, when all seven Marines aboard a refueling tanker were killed in a fiery crash near Shamsi air base in remote southwestern Pakistan. The cause remains under investigation, though Marines said there was no sign of hostile ground fire.
The only other fatal crash of a U.S. military aircraft during the war, which began Oct. 7, was an Army Black Hawk helicopter that crashed in Pakistan on Oct. 19, killing two Army Rangers.
Some Marines have begun transferring out of Afghanistan to return to troop ships from which they can be quickly deployed on future missions. The Army's 101st Airborne Division took over command of the Kandahar base Saturday.
Some Marines are remaining on the base to take part in other possible missions as the United States presses the search for Osama bin Laden and other renegades from al-Qaida, blamed for the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States, and their deposed Taliban allies.
Jarvis said that another 58 Taliban and al-Qaida detainees had been flown out of the Kandahar base Saturday. Thirty were taken to an undisclosed location in Pakistan and are presumably Pakistani nationals. The rest were bound for the detention facility at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
There are now 232 detainees at Kandahar, down from a high of about 400.
Human rights groups have expressed alarm about the treatment of detainees, saying the tiny, open-air cells at Guantanamo fall below internationally accepted standards for prisoners of war.
Canadian Deputy Prime Minister John Manley said Saturday in Pakistan that the United States should meet "humane norms" in the treatment of detainees.
In other developments:
_ Spanish police arrested two suspected al-Qaida operatives--a Moroccan and an Algerian--in the town of Hospitalet just north of Barcelona, the Spanish news agency EFE reported.
_ Iran has reinstated visa requirements for Arabs from Gulf nations to keep out al-Qaida members, the official Iranian news agency said Saturday. The United States has said Iran may be seeking to destabilize the newly installed U.N.-backed administration in Kabul.
The Army is beginning its mission at a time when the focus of international operations is shifting from routing the Taliban and al-Qaida to rebuilding this country, shattered after nearly 23 years of war.
In a sign of the change, Afghan and Russian officials Saturday formally reopened the Salang Tunnel, a key route through the forbidding mountains of northern Afghanistan.
Anti-Taliban fighters blew up the entrance to the tunnel in 1997 to defend their strongholds in the rugged mountains and remote valleys north of the capital Kabul.
Repair workers removed tons of concrete rubble and other debris from the tunnel, and Russian bomb-disposal experts cleared the tunnel of more than 6,700 tons of mines and explosives.
Reopening the tunnel will make it easier to deliver humanitarian aid from Russia and other countries to the north to needy Afghans in Kabul and central Afghanistan.
Twenty-six Russian trucks carrying 100 tons of flour Saturday became the first convoy through the three-kilometer (two-mile) tunnel--which was used by Soviet troops in the 1970s in their invasion of the country.
On Monday, representatives of the United States and more than 50 countries and international organizations meet in the Japanese capital to draw up plans for rebuilding Afghanistan.
They are expected to pledge up to dlrs 3 billion to pay for the first 2 1/2 years of reconstruction in the devastated country, Japanese press reports said Saturday.
That includes a dlrs 500 million donation by Japan that Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will announce in a speech opening the conference, said the front-page report in the Yomiuri newspaper.
The United States is reportedly planning to pledge dlrs 400 million, and contributions from 15 European Union members are expected to top dlrs 350 million.
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