Afghan drugs, kills 9 militia cohorts

Assault by member of local police raises coalition concerns on program

— A member of an Afghan militia promoted by the U.S. military to protect rural villages drugged his colleagues and killed at least nine of them as they slept Friday, the third deadly episode involving the irregular guard force in March.

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The killings added to concerns about the militia, known as the Afghan Local Police. Touted by U.S. military commanders as a way to give Afghans a larger stake in battling the insurgency, the local police program has been assailed by rights advocates and many Afghans as bringing former Taliban and criminal elements into positions of armed authority.

Friday’s killings took place at a local police command post in Paktika province, an area of eastern Afghanistan thick with Taliban and allied insurgents.

The assailant, identified as Assadullah, who like many Afghans goes by a single name, had Thursday night laced food being served at the post with crushed sleeping pills, said Dawlat Khan Zadran, the police chief of Paktika. The assailant then waited a few hours for the drugs to kick in and sometime after midnight turned his AK-47 assault rifle on his fellow local police.

At least nine Afghan local police were killed at the post in the remote Yayakhil district of the province, Zadran said. The suspect escaped in a pickup with most of the weapons from the post.

Offices from the national police force have since arrested two of the suspect’s brothers and the man who recommended Assadullah be recruited into the local police, Zadran said.

Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said Assadullah had rejoined the insurgency’s ranks after infiltrating the command post a few days ago. He referred to the assailant by what appeared to be a pseudonym, Mujahid Sanaullah.

The Taliban often take credit for attacks by members of the Afghan security forces, especially when coalition servicemen are slain.

A U.S. military report released in December found some members of the force have engaged in illegal taxation, carried weapons outside their villages and committed assault. The report was a response to a critical study of the program by Human Rights Watch.

Still, the December report concluded that the U.S. military leadership thinks the Afghan local police have generally been effective.

But problems with the local police have continued. Another Afghan local policeman allowed Taliban to enter his guard post March 7 and kill nine of his fellow Afghan local police in the southern province of Uruzgan.

On Monday, an Afghan local policeman shot and killed a coalition soldier in Paktika province, the same province where Friday’s killings took place. The province borders Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal area, a hub for Islamist militancy in South Asia.

Coalition losses, meanwhile, continued to mount, with NATO saying Friday that one of its servicemen was killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan and another in an insurgent attack. NATO provided no additional details. The number of coalition deaths this year stands at 94, according to icasualties.org, an independent website that tracks deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Meanwhile, the lawyer representing Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the soldier charged with 17 counts of murder in the deaths of Afghan civilians this month, said military prosecutors had denied members of his legal team access to witnesses at a Kandahar hospital, as well as to investigative files, medical records and surveillance video.

“We were expecting a lot more cooperation,” Bales’ lead lawyer, John Henry Browne, said during a news conference Friday in Seattle.

Browne said that after members of his team were prevented from interviewing survivors at a hospital, prosecutors interviewed those witnesses the next day. The witnesses were then released, leaving no contact information. “They could just disappear into the countryside,” Browne said.

He also said the team was not given access to health records for the wounded civilians or surveillance video that purportedly shows Bales returning to his combat outpost after the shootings.

“The prosecution will provide the defense with evidence in accordance with the rules for courts-martial and the military rules of evidence,” said Maj. Chris Ophardt, an Army spokesman at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, south of Tacoma, Wash., where Bales was stationed. “Within these guidelines the prosecution is and has been communicating with the defense.” Information for this article was contributed by James Dao and William Yardley of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 03/31/2012

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