The White House said on Monday that a recent Newsweek magazine article on Koran desecration by US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has damaged US image abroad.

"The report has had serious consequences," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged," he added.

A Newsweek story in its issue dated May 9 reported that American military investigators had found evidence that interrogators at the Guantanamo prison facility had flushed a Koran down a toilet, to get inmates there to talk.

The article has sparked violent protests in Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, Pakistan and other Muslim countries.

Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to be on US newsstand on Monday, that the magazine had made errors in the report on Koran desecration, and apologized for the mistakes.

Whitaker wrote that the information for the report had come from a "knowledgeable US government source," and that the source later told the magazine he could not be certain about where had seen the information.

"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the US soldiers caught in its midst," Whitaker wrote.

McClellan said that it was "puzzling" that while the magazine acknowledged it got the facts wrong, it refused to retract the story. "I think there's a certain journalistic standard that should be met and in this instance it was not," he said.

At the Pentagon, spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Newsweek article "was irresponsible and had significant consequences that reverberated throughout Muslim communities around the world."

There was no evidence to support the Newsweek story, and the allegation about Koran desecration "is demonstrably false," he said.

The magazine "hid behind anonymous sources, which by their own admission do not withstand scrutiny," and couldn't "retract the damage they have done to this nation or those that were viciously attacked by those false allegations," Whitman said.

Source: Xinhua