Ahmed Wali Karzai, Brother of Afghan President, Killed by Trusted Guard
July 12th, 2011Update: Bodyguard Who Killed Karzai’s Brother Was Trusted CIA Contact
Via: Independent:
The bodyguard who assassinated President Hamid Karzai’s brother had been working closely with US Special Forces and the CIA before he was recruited by the Taliban, raising fears over the Islamist movement’s increasingly sophisticated intelligence apparatus which has managed to threaten the inner circles of power in Afghanistan.
Sardar Mohammad, who shot Ahmed Wali Karzai at his home in Kandahar City on Tuesday, also held regular meetings with British officials, and had two brothers-in-law serving in a CIA-run paramilitary unit, the Kandahar Strike Force, the Washington Post reported yesterday.
—End Update—
I don’t know if this assassination has anything to do with Ahmed Karzai’s links to heroin trafficking, but here’s an excerpt from a 2008 New York Times piece that’s pretty interesting:
When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden beneath concrete blocks in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander quickly impounded the truck and notified his boss.
Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs, Mr. Jan later told American investigators, according to notes from the debriefing obtained by The New York Times. He said he complied after getting a phone call from an aide to President Karzai directing him to release the truck.
Two years later, American and Afghan counternarcotics forces stopped another truck, this time near Kabul, finding more than 110 pounds of heroin. Soon after the seizure, United States investigators told other American officials that they had discovered links between the drug shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai, according to a participant in the briefing.
The assertions about the involvement of the president’s brother in the incidents were never investigated, according to American and Afghan officials, even though allegations that he has benefited from narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan.
Via: Washington Post:
The half-brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai was assassinated by a trusted local security official Tuesday, a political killing that was immediately claimed by the Taliban and makes grimly clear the vulnerability of Afghan officials as the United States prepares to reduce its military presence.
Ahmed Wali Karzai — head of Kandahar’s provincial council and widely considered the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan — was meeting with tribal elders and politicians in his heavily fortified home in downtown Kandahar city Tuesday morning, according to two people at the house at the time.
Sardar Mohammad, a longtime confidant and commander of the police post near Karzai’s ancestral home, arrived and requested a private discussion, officials said. Karzai and Mohammad left for another room, and soon three gunshots rang out.
Agha Lalai Destegeri, the deputy provincial council chief, said he rushed in to find Karzai shot in the head, chest and hand.
Karzai’s other guards entered the room and shot and killed Mohammad, officials said. A bleeding Karzai was driven by his entourage a short distance across town to Mirwais Hospital, but he did not survive, Destegeri and other Afghan officials said.
