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One Dead As Afghan Officials Are Attacked At Site Of Killing Spree

March 13, 2012
by RFE/RL

Officials say an Afghan soldier was killed when suspected militants opened fire on an Afghan government delegation that was visiting one of two villages in southern Afghanistan where a U.S. soldier is believed to have shot dead 16 Afghan civilians.

A Kandahar Province police official, General Abdul Razaq, said the gunfire killed an Afghan soldier who was providing security for the delegation visiting Balandi village.

The official said another Afghan soldier and a military prosecutor were wounded.

The delegation, which included two of President Hamid Karzai's brothers and other senior officials, was attenting a memorial service in a mosque for victims when the shooting started.

One of the president's brothers, Qayum Karzai, said the members of the delegation, which also included Kandahar Governor Tooryalai Wesa and Minister of Border and Tribal Affairs Asadullah Khalid, were safe and had returned to the city of Kandahar.

The U.S. military is holding an Army staff sergeant in custody who is suspected of carrying out the March 11 killings in two villages close to his base in Kandahar's Panjwai district.

Karzai has said that nine of the 16 killed were children, and three were women.

U.S. officials have identified the suspect as a married, 38-year-old father of two who was trained as a sniper. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta suggested on his way to Kyrgyzstan overnight that the suspect could face the death penalty in a military trial.

The killings have caused outrage in Afghanistan but so far have not sparked the kind of violent protests seen last month after it emerged that American soldiers had burned copies of the Koran and other Islamic texts at the Bagram Air Field. U.S. officials described those burnings as an erroneous case of disposal.

Hundreds of university students staged a protest in the eastern city of Jalalabad in reaction to the U.S. soldier's shooting spree. The students shouted, "Death to America!" and, "Death to the soldier who killed our civilians!"

Some protesters called for a public trial of the soldier, and others burned an effigy of U.S. President Barack Obama.

"We don't want any strategic partnership with the foreign troops," protester Dadullah Khans said he was against the presence of foreign troops in the country. "Afghans are independent people we want to live independently and we don't want to live under any country's colonization, so once again we condemn the Kandahar incident with the strongest words and urge the authorities to put the criminal to trial."

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said in a statement sent to reporters on March 13 that the soldier should be tried as a war criminal and executed by the victims' relatives.

President Obama on March 12 expressed his shock and sadness and extended his condolences to the families of the victims. But he said the international community should not perform a rushed withdrawal from Afghanistan.

"What we don't want to do is to do it in a way that is just a rush for the exits," Obama said. "We have got hundreds of advisers in the civilian areas as well, we have got huge amounts of equipment that have to be moved out. We have got to make sure that the Afghans can protect their borders and prevent Al-Qaeda coming back. So, we have to do it in a responsible way."

U.S. and other foreign forces are due to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, and U.S. and Afghan officials have been negotiating a pact on the long-term presence of U.S. troops in the country.

With AP, AFP, Reuters, and dpa reporting

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/one_dead_afghan_officials_ attacked_at_site_of_us_soldier_killing_spree/24513980.html

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One Dead As Afghan Officials Are Attacked At Site Of Killing Spree