``Iran's armed forces are on full alert to safeguard the territorial integrity of the country and the enemies of Iran should know that the nation will defend its national identity and prestige against any aggressors,'' said Mehdi Chamran, head of the sacred defence committee of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Iran would soon have deployed a total of 270,000 forces along most of its 850-km border with Afghanistan, he said.

Chamran's remarks followed reports that the ultra-Islamic Taliban captured the city of Bamiyan from the pro-Iranian Shiite group Hezb-e-Vahdat. The town had been one of the few remaining spots in Afghanistan outside Taliban control.

The mission in the Tajikistan capital, Dushanbe, of deposed president Buranuddin Rabbani confirmed the town had been captured late yesterday.

Iranian television,also confirming the claim, reported that the Taliban forces were executing thousands of residents of Bamiyan and warned of another ``massive genocide'' in this city.

Iran was scheduled today to collect the remains of eight Iranian diplomats and a reporter of the official Iranian news agency who were found by the Taliban near the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

The corpses were to be transported by a United Nations plane from Afghanistan either to Mashad in north-east Iran or directly to Teheran.

The Iranian embassy in Islamabad yesterday rejected Pakistani press reports that the Taliban had downed an Iranian plane over Bamiyan as ``unfounded rumours aimed at diverting the public opinion from the current incidents in Afghanistan''.

In a statement carried by IRNA, the embassy further denied any attacks against the Pakistani embassy in Teheran.

Deputy foreign minister Mohsen Aminzadeh has once again demanded that the killers of the Iranian diplomats be handed over to Iran, but the Taliban has rejectedit.

Aminzadeh further insists that the remaining Iranian diplomats are alive -- one of them injured -- and somewhere in Afghanistan. Pakistani sources, however, doubt that either is alive.

Iran's foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi said yesterday that top Iranian officials had taken ``very important decisions'' regarding Afghanistan in an emergency session of the supreme national security council, the highest decision-making body of the country.