June 1, 2006
Americans Fired Into Crowd, Afghan Says
By CARLOTTA GALL and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA
KABUL, Afghanistan, May 31 -- American soldiers involved in a vehicle crash here on Monday that set off rioting then fired into the crowd of protesters and killed four people, according to the chief of the highway police in Kabul, Gen. Amanullah Gozar, who saw the accident.
Three people died in the crash caused by a runaway United States Army truck, and four people died of gunfire from the last vehicle in the convoy as the American forces extricated themselves from an increasingly hostile crowd, General Gozar said in an interview on Wednesday.
He dismissed rumors that had spread through the city that the American soldiers deliberately rammed vehicles, even including his own car. ''I can say clearly it was an accident,'' he said.
The United States military initially said in a statement that the truck had a mechanical failure and called the incident ''a tragic accident.'' It said there were ''indications'' that ''warning shots over the crowd'' had been fired from at least one military vehicle. General Gozar's account is the first declaration from a senior Afghan official that American soldiers directed lethal fire on the crowd.
An American military spokesman, Col. Tom Collins, said he had not heard that the last vehicle had fired into the crowd or that four people had been killed by Americans. ''Our soldiers believed fire was coming from the crowd, and they fired their weapons in self-defense,'' he said.
He said soldiers in one vehicle had fired their weapons over the heads of the crowd, adding that a thorough investigation was under way and that all the soldiers would make statements to the investigators. ''We are examining all information; it will all be part of the investigation,'' he said.
The deaths of civilians, in the initial car crash and in the protests that followed, prompted the worst anti-American riots in Kabul since the fall of the Taliban four years ago. Protesters fought the police and ransacked the offices of foreign organizations across the city. Twelve people were killed, including one policeman, and 138 were wounded as the police and Afghan Army soldiers struggled to contain the violence, police officials said.
General Gozar, who is a powerful commander of the Northern Alliance, which fought the Taliban, dismissed suggestions that politics, or factions opposed to President Hamid Karzai, had driven the protests, and blamed the violence on criminal elements who took advantage of the situation. He also criticized the Kabul police for not being prepared to contain the violence and said the president had asked him at midafternoon on Monday to move to the center of the city with his highway police officers to help put down the riots.
Colonel Collins said the soldiers stayed at the crash scene for 45 minutes until a relief vehicle arrived to tow the broken truck away, and reported that one civilian man had been killed in the car crash and six had been injured, two of them seriously. The soldiers provided first aid to the injured until ambulances arrived to take them away, he said.
General Gozar, whose house overlooks the main road into Kabul from the north, said he heard a truck horn on Monday morning and looked out his window to see the driver of a heavy military truck waving frantically to people to get out of the way. The truck hit a station wagon, then two military vehicles in the convoy, and then was swallowed by a dust cloud at the foot of the hill, he said.
When he arrived at the crash scene a few minutes later, the American soldiers had stopped their convoy and were treating the civilians injured in the other cars, while others stood guard, he said. A crowd of shopkeepers and pushcart operators gathered and began pelting the soldiers with stones. The police could not contain the crowd, and finally the American soldiers escaped, he said.
''The first American vehicles were firing in the air, but the last one fired at the people,'' he said. As the American soldiers escaped, leaving four people dead, the crowd turned on the Afghan police, burning one of their cars and stabbing a policeman, he said. The riot quickly spread. ''People were really angry,'' he said.
General Gozar briefed President Karzai on the episode, and said he told the president that while it was clearly an accident, the behavior of the Americans had contributed to the people's anger. Arrogant driving -- driving fast or not allowing cars to overtake their convoy -- irritated people, he said. People were also angered when the soldiers prevented them from approaching the crashed cars to help the injured, he said.
In more violence in southern Afghanistan, Taliban insurgents overran and burned down the administration and police offices of a district in Oruzgan Province on Tuesday night, in one of the most blatant challenges to the government and foreign forces stationed in the province.
About 40 police and administration officials fled the district center to another location under siege by Taliban militants, said Ruzi Khan, the former police chief of the province. A Taliban spokesman, Qari Muhammad Yousuf, confirmed that the attack had occurred.
In a separate insurgent attack, the deputy police chief of neighboring Zabul Province was killed Wednesday in an ambush.