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Drug link reported in Afghan killing
Compiled from Times wires KABUL, Afghanistan -- As Afghans around the country mourned the killing of a vice president, Afghan officials said Sunday they were investigating the possibility he had been killed by drug lords who had been double-crossed during a Western-backed campaign to destroy the country's poppy crop. Abdul Qadir, who was shot and killed Saturday, had been overseeing the Western-financed campaign, which began in April, to root out the poppy crop in the country. Afghan officials have been paying poppy farmers about $500 per acre to destroy their plants. Qadir had recently complained that the money was not being distributed to the farmers even though they were bowing to his demand to uproot their poppies, according to the New York Times, citing a senior Afghan official. The official said that Qadir's efforts, coupled with the failure to pay certain farmers, may have enraged powerful members of the country's opium trade. Those drug lords, the Afghan official said, may have decided to take revenge. Qadir, a wealthy businessman from Jalalabad, had long been suspected of enriching himself through involvement in the opium trade. Some Afghans here speculated that Qadir may have made enemies by favoring one drug lord over another. In the weeks before his death, Qadir had complained to others in Kabul about his predicament, and he acknowledged his problems in an interview after he was sworn in as one of the country's five vice presidents late last month. Qadir said then an Afghan organization designated to dole out the Western money to poppy farmers had kept it instead. But at the time, Qadir indicated in the interview that the problem had been resolved. The Afghan organization "stole the money," Qadir said during the interview. "They stopped distributing the money, but now they will distribute it." Qadir's troubles came to light a day after a pair of gunmen shot and killed him in his car as he left his office in downtown Kabul. The killers escaped, and the police detained 10 government guards for failing to prevent the attack or to chase his assailants. State-run television said two men had been detained for questioning after they were stopped at a Kabul checkpoint in a car similar to the one used by the killers for their getaway. Qadir's death could deal a heavy blow to the Western-backed government of newly elected President Hamid Karzai, though it may be less damaging if it turns out that it was tied to Qadir's individual problems. President Bush suggested the killing could have been related to the effort to stem the country's drug trade. In remarks he made Saturday, Bush said: "The Afghan government believes they can handle the investigation. There's all kinds of scenarios as to who killed him. It could be drug lords, it could be longtime rivals. All we know is a good man is dead and we mourn his loss." Afghan officials said they were examining a number of possible motives for Qadir's killing, including that he might have been the target of fighters or his political rivals. Karzai was relying on Qadir, an ethnic Pashtun, to coax members of that ethnic group, the country's largest, into supporting the government. While Karzai is himself an ethnic Pashtun, the government he heads is dominated by ethnic Tajiks, who led the resistance against the Taliban. Qadir's long involvement in the cutthroat world of Afghan politics ensured that he had many enemies. He fought against the Taliban, but he belonged to a political party that once gave shelter to Osama bin Laden. As he emerged as the governor of Nangarhar province after the rout of the Taliban, he angered many of his rivals. Any and all of Qadir's faults seemed forgotten Sunday, as Afghans poured into the streets of Kabul and Jalalabad, his home, to bid him farewell. The funeral began in the morning, when his flag-draped coffin was carried atop an artillery piece through the streets of Kabul, accompanied by a line of soldiers and a military band. Qadir's body was then flown to Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province, aboard a helicopter provided by the international peacekeeping force. During a speech to mourners in Jalalabad, Afghan Chief Justice Fazle Hadi Shinwari promised the government was doing everything possible to find the killers and he urged people to remain calm. "This is a test for the people of Afghanistan, of Nangarhar," Shinwari told mourners. "They should be aware of this and pass this test." In Washington, U.S. lawmakers said Qadir's assassination should compel the United States to consider an active role in providing security. U.S. operations have been directed at pursuing Taliban and al-Qaida fugitives rather than peacekeeping. "This was definitely a throwback to the old Afghanistan and a setback to the establishment of the new Afghanistan," said Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Col. Samet Oz, a spokesman for the international security force charged with keeping order in Kabul, said the attack on Qadir was most likely an isolated one. He did not elaborate, but predicted that the violence was over for now.
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
