Kabul, February 16
Assassinated Afghan Minister Abdul Rahman was buried today after a sombre funeral procession led by interim leader Hamid Karzai as fresh violence in the Capital raised new fears about the country’s fragile security.Several hundred troops, their rifles fitted with bayonets, escorted the coffin carrying the body of the interim government’s Air Transport and Tourism Minister, whose killing the country’s leadership said was plotted by senior government officials.
“This event again proves that we need to save ourselves from the oppression of the gun and the force of the knife,” Mr Karzai told hundreds of rain-soaked mourners at a public burial ground on the edge of Kabul.
Saudi Arabia, a US. official said, has assured Afghanistan it will return three Afghan officials named as suspects in the killing, which happened late on Thursday at Kabul airport. At least three more suspects have been detained in Afghanistan.
The murder, an attack on international peacekeepers today and chaos outside a soccer match in Kabul yesterday, underscored the problems facing Afghanistan’s UN-backed interim government as it struggles to reconcile rival factions and rebuild a volatile nation recovering from years of war.
Old tribal and ethnic rivalries have resurfaced and exploded in bloodshed in some places while aid agencies warn that a rising tide of crime is threatening their efforts to bring help to the war-shattered country’s millions of destitute.
Today, an observation post of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) came under fire briefly in the Afghan Capital, the first such attack on foreign forces in Kabul.
None of the British troops in the post was hurt.
The government did not say how Rahman was killed but earlier reports and witnesses said he was pulled off an airliner on Thursday evening and beaten to death by a mob.
Rahman was a senior figure in the Northern Alliance which dominated the interim government, but later switched his allegiance to former King Zahir Shah.
Reuters
