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(CNSNews.com) -- Nine more people have been killed in Afghanistan, clerics are threatening a holy war, and Islamic leaders are urging worldwide Muslim protests in response to a Newsweek report claiming that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay threw a Koran into a toilet -- a report the magazine now concedes may be inaccurate.

"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker said in an editorial published in Newsweek's latest edition and posted on the magazine's website.

Protests spread from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Indonesia and Arab countries on Friday, stoked by mosque imams' sermons during Friday prayers.

The death toll in a week of rioting in Afghanistan rose to at least 15 and several hundred clerics issued a statement Sunday saying they would call for a jihad against the U.S. if those responsible for the alleged desecration were not handed over to an Islamic country for punishment within three days.

The statement was read by a senior official after clerics met in a mosque in Faizabad, capital of the northeastern Badakhstan province.

In Newsweek's May 9 edition, a brief item carried a single sentence saying that a U.S. military investigation had found that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, where Islamist terror suspects are being held, had flushed a Koran down a toilet.

A populist politician in Pakistan called a press conference to draw attention to the claim, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia issued strongly worded statements, and protests erupted in the Afghan city of Jalalabad and spread.

The item was picked up by Muslim media outlets, some of which have depicted the toilet allegation as a fact rather than a claim made by an unnamed source. Pakistan's Dawn daily stated in an editorial -- without qualification -- that "the desecration of the Holy Koran at Guantanamo ... has sent a wave of revulsion across the Muslim world."

Late last week Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice added her voice to earlier administration statements saying the allegation was being investigated and that any desecration of the Koran would not be tolerated.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday the military's own probe could find no evidence of the supposed incident.

Newsweek now reports that, on rechecking with the senior U.S. official who earlier reported seeing details of the Koran incident in a report on a military investigation, the "longtime reliable source" could no longer be sure exactly where he had seen them.

Whitaker said Newsweek reporters had sought comment from two Defense Department officials. One declined, while the other challenged another part of the story but did not dispute the Koran claim.

"Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges, and so will we."

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