A rchive Date
[ 05-03-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Afghanistan ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Canoe/canoecnews.html
Minister assassinated?
By LAURA KING - The Associated Press
Friday, Feb. 15, 2002
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Prime Minister Hamid Karzai accused six senior government officials of killing the country's aviation minister and said Friday that they were motivated by a long-standing feud. Three were arrested and the others were being sought in Saudi Arabia.
The officials include generals and members of the intelligence service and the justice ministry, said Karzai's information minister, Abdul Rahim Makhdoom.
The aviation and tourism minister, Abdul Rahman, was killed Thursday in what appeared to be a mob attack on his plane at Kabul's airport by pilgrims angry over delays in their travel to Saudi Arabia for the annual hajj, or Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. Witnesses and officials said pilgrims beat the minister to death and tossed his body to the tarmac.
The brutal slaying had raised fears over the ability of Karzai's government to keep public order in post-Taliban Afghanistan. But Karzai's comments suggested a darker problem: that factional divisions his government has vowed to end were turning bloody within his administration.
Karzai said the attack had "nothing to do with" the pilgrims. "He was killed by people who planned it," Karzai told reporters at a hastily called news conference. "We are asking the Saudis to arrest them and bring them back. ... We will try them. We will put them behind bars."
It was unclear whether he was suggesting that the officials incited the mob and whether the pilgrims gave cover to a deliberate attack. Rahman was going to New Delhi, India with a delegation on government business.
Makhdoom gave journalists five names of men he said were wanted in connection with the slaying. He said three were believed to have left on flights for Saudi Arabia along with pilgrims traveling there: Gen. Abdullah Jan Tawhidi, the deputy intelligence chief; Gen. Kalandar Beg, deputy of the technical office of the defense ministry; and an official of the Justice Ministry for whom only one name was given, Halim.
Three are already under arrest in connection with the case; one was identified only as Abdul Rehim.
Karzai, the country's interim leader, suggested that the killing was linked to a blood feud dating back to the struggle against the Taliban militia during their 1996-2001 rule. The five suspects named were part of a faction of the northern alliance with which Rahman had broken. "All this ... goes back to the days of the resistance," Karzai said, without giving any details. "We are trying to do justice."
Rahman had been a member of the Jamiat e-Islami party, which is the northern alliance faction of ex-President Burhanuddin Rabbani and slain opposition leader Ahmed Shah Massood. But sometime during the Taliban years, he switched his alliance to a group loyal to exiled king Zaher Shah.
The northern alliance led the fight against the Taliban and now makes up a large part of the interim government, though Karzai himself is not a member.
Afghanistan has seen some factional violence since Karzai's government came to power in December - but mainly between factions nominally loyal to the government vying for control in provincial areas. This was the first allegation of factional bloodshed at the heart of the new administration.
The capital, Kabul, saw further disorder Friday when a melee broke out at the main soccer stadium, marring a goodwill game between peacekeepers and an Afghan team. Afghan police beat back an unruly overflow crowd outside the stadium with clubs and rifle butts. Fifty Afghans and five peacekeepers were injured, none seriously.
Rahman's slaying sent Karzai's Cabinet into an emergency session overnight. The Kabul airport was sealed off Friday, and Interior Ministry police were stationed along the roads leading to the main entrance.
"We lost a good man, an educated man," said a top aide to Rahman, Mohammed Yakoub Nuristani. "He wanted to help rebuild Afghanistan."
Rahman, 49, was trained as a medical doctor. He fled Afghanistan when the Taliban took over and had been living in exile in New Delhi.
Airport officials and witnesses said that the number of pilgrims stranded at Kabul airport had been swelling for days - a backup caused by problems in getting Saudi visas, a lack of flights and delays in issuing tickets. By Thursday, thousands were reportedly waiting in the freezing-cold airport and growing increasingly angry.
Hundreds blocked Rahman's plane, then stormed it when Rahman emerged to try to talk to the crowd, said Abdul Wahab Nuristani, the deputy chief of a military division in eastern Afghanistan. Rahman was seized, beaten and his body tossed to the tarmac below, he said, citing witness accounts.
Several pilgrims were hurt in the melee, as were 10 members of the staff of Afghanistan's Ariana Airlines - including its president. A member of the flight's security detail was injured when he was thrown from the plane, said Interior Ministry spokesman Faraidoon, who like many Afghans uses one name.
Mohammed Anif, who was waiting to see off his father on the pilgrimage, or hajj, said he heard people in the crowd talking angrily about the minister using the plane for an official trip while they waited for their own plane.
"They were saying that the hajj was the most important thing, and how could he do this," Anif said. "Some were saying they wanted to lie down in front of the plane to keep it from taking off, and others said, 'No, let's stop it another way."'
"They went running up the steps and inside the plane, and we saw struggles and a body thrown out of the plane," he said.
After the killing, two pilgrimage flights left the airport at 2 a.m. and another was to depart later Friday, airport officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A contingent of British and French peacekeepers, were stationed less than a quarter-mile away in the military part of the airport. But British Capt. Graham Dunlop, a peacekeeper spokesman, said the incident "happened very quickly" and that the civilian part of the airport was the responsibility of Afghan authorities.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who met Friday with Karzai, conveyed his condolences. Straw dismissed concerns over order in Kabul. "It has to be seen in relative terms," he told reporters. "The city is very much safer then before."
Kabul is patrolled by an international peacekeeping force that numbers about 3,200 troops thus far. Karzai has repeatedly appealed for an enlarging of the force and an expansion of its deployment outside of Kabul.
Straw discussed the request with Karzai on Friday, but he made no comment on it.
The first soldiers from Turkey's contingent of peacekeepers prepared to fly Friday to Afghanistan - the first from a Muslim country to join the force. Turkey may take over leadership of the force from Britain in the spring.
Also Friday, a Pakistani official said the former Taliban governor of the western Afghan province of Herat, Khairullah Khrerkhawa, was arrested in a Pakistani village along the Afghan border.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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