Afghan Stability in Question

KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 15 — A day after an Afghan cabinet minister was apparently beaten to death by a mob of angry Muslim pilgrims, the chairman of the interim government said tonight that the killing had been an assassination that involved five high-ranking officials from the defense, intelligence and justice ministries.

The startling accusation about Thursday night's fatal attack on Abdul Rahman, the air transport and tourism minister, at Kabul International Airport cast serious doubt on the stability and unity of Hamid Karzai's national government. Installed seven weeks ago, the new administration is a fragile coalition made up mostly of backers of the former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, and leaders of the Northern Alliance, an amalgam of groups from northern Afghanistan whose troops helped oust the Taliban in November.

A senior aide to Karzai said tonight that three of the officials accused of conspiring to kill Rahman had fled on a plane to Saudi Arabia late Thursday night and that Afghanistan has requested their extradition to face charges. He said four other men had been arrested, but they were not identified.

"This was not part of the hajjis [Muslim pilgrims]. This assassination took place because of personal hostility and hatred, and it was carried out by a group of people," Karzai said tonight at a hastily called news conference. He insisted the slaying was not politically motivated, but he did not elaborate.

A second violent episode erupted here this afternoon at a heavily guarded and overcrowded soccer match between an Afghan team and players from the international peacekeeping force in Kabul. Fans barred from entering began throwing rocks into the crowded stadium, and Afghan police fended them off with tear gas and rifle butts. By nightfall, calm had returned to the city.

Karzai called Rahman's death a "very tragic incident" carried out by "people who planned it ... They will be tried. They will be put behind bars."

The slain aviation minister held the same post in the government of former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, political leader of the Northern Alliance, between 1992 and 1996, when he belonged to Rabbani's Islamic militia faction, Jamiat-i-Islami. He later went into exile in the United States and emerged as a supporter of the former king.

In Washington, a senior State Department official expressed skepticism about Karzai's claim, according to the Associated Press. The official, asking not to be identified, said the riot that erupted at the airport was spontaneous and that the crowd of pilgrims had become ill-tempered after waiting for two days for travel documents from Saudi Arabia. The official also said that Rahman was stabbed and not beaten, but acknowledged that the alleged assailant may have had political motives.

Karzai's minister of information and culture, Sayed Raheen, said the killing was carried out for "personal reasons. It was not political at all." He said the plot harkened "back to the days of the resistence," a reference to personal and political enmities that emerged in the turmoil of civil war in the mid-1990s and continued during the five-year armed resistence to the Taliban regime under Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was slain in September.

Raheen said the plot involved 20 members of the government, including five top officials. He named Gen. Abdullah Jan Tawhidi, head of intelligence; Qalander Beg, a senior defense official; and Sananwal Haleem, a senior prosecutor in the Justice Ministry, all of whom he said had fled to Saudi Arabia. He did not name the others.

The information and culture minister, a close confidant of Karzai, also said four people had been arrested, including a man he identified only as Abdul Rahim. He also said several security officials had been suspended from their posts, including a senior police official and the chief of security at the airport where the slaying took place.

Karzai's announcement contradicted a statement made earlier in the day by an aide to Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim, who blamed the al Qaeda terrorist network for the attack. The aide told the Agence France-Presse news service that "al Qaeda terrorists were behind this. They were trying to sabotage the interim government and the peace process."

Rahman died late Thursday after he was besieged and beaten by an agitated mob of Muslim pilgrims when he attempted to leave on an Ariana Afghan Airlines flight to New Delhi, witnesses said. The men were waiting for flights to Mecca for an annual Muslim pilgrimage, called the hajj, and they were angry that flights had been repeatedly delayed.

Performing the hajj is one of the five basic duties of Islam prescribed in the Koran, and the expensive trip is often the highlight of a Muslim's religious life, especially in an impoverished country like Afghanistan where few people can afford to travel abroad.

Numerous witnesses, including security guards and pilgrims who were still at the airport this morning, described seeing the crowd surround Rahman's plane about 6 p.m., push the minister out and begin beating him, even though he agreed to resign on the spot. Rahman was rescued and rushed to Kabul's military hospital, but officials said he died of his injuries Thursday night.

"The people rushed into the plane and the minister was pushed down the stairs. The people began to beat him. They said, 'Until you prepare a plane for us, you cannot fly,' " said Rahmed Khoda, 37, a shopkeeper from Baghlan province who was among several hundred pilgrims still waiting at the airport this morning.

Other pilgrims waiting for flights today complained that they had been forced to sleep for several nights in the cold, many of them clad only in ritual white cloth wrappings and sandals, and they blamed the delays on officials connected with the hajj arrangements.

Karzai and his aides did not explain whether the plotters acted alone or used the angry mob of pilgrims as a cover. But their charges implied that somehow, the alleged government conspirators had led the attack or mingled with the airport crowd, then fled to Saudi Arabia along with 900 pilgrims who boarded two late-night flights to Mecca.

There was no suggestion by Karzai that the conspirators were attempting to overthrow his government, but the officials named by Makhdoom were all members of the Northern Alliance who have their own power bases and did not support Karzai's appointment to head the interim government.

Karzai's accusations revealed a deep and potentially destabilizing split in his administration, taking what had apparently been a spontaneous, emotional mob action without political overtones and characterizing it as a deliberate killing by elements within the government.

According to witnesses, police at the airport Thursday were not able to overcome Rahman's attackers, and a contingent of international peacekeepers at the airport did not intervene. Officials from the international force, which has 3,500 troops in the capital, said they were responsible only for the military portion of the airport and were not asked to help.

A senior U.S. liaison officer with the international peacekeeping force, Col. Wayland Parker, said the violence had escalated too quickly to be controlled and that the situation had reportedly been calm until Rahman arrived and was confronted by the crowd. He said the peacekeeping forces are now reviewing their policy on how and when to assist Afghan troops.

"This was a religious venture. These were not militants; they had already been screened [for visas]," he said. "Some of them had been waiting for 24 hours ... Some elements in the crowd seemed to hold the minister responsible, and they started to get physical."

More than 15,000 hajj pilgrims gathered in Kabul from across the country this week, and government officials were aware of their frustrations over the delayed flights.