NATO special forces kill cousin of Afghan President Hamid Karzai during house raid

NATO special forces kill cousin of Afghan President Hamid Karzai during house raid

 

NATO forces killed an elderly cousin of Afghan president Hamid Karzai by mistake yesterday during a botched night raid.

Officials said Haji Yar Muhammad Khan, 65, a second cousin of the president, was accidentally shot in Mr Karzai’s home village of Karz, near the southern city of Kandahar.

British troops are operating in the area but it is unclear which forces were involved in the American-led raid on a Taliban leader.

Ahmad Wali Karzai, head of the provincial council and brother of the president, said: ‘While the operation was going on, Khan walked out of his house and was shot by mistake. He was not the target.’ 

But a tribal elder said: ‘Many tanks surrounded the house. The Americans went in, brought out Haji Muhammad and shot him.’

The shooting of such a high- profile figure will fuel the furious row between Mr Karzai and ISAF, the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force, over repeated civilian deaths.

The U.S. offered a rare apology this month after nine Afghan boys were gunned down by helicopters as they collected firewood. 

Mr Karzai’s spokesman, said: ‘The president calls on ISAF to protect civilians rather than killing them.’ 

Last year, 2,777 civilians were killed – the most since the Taliban were ousted in 2001 – 75 per cent of them by insurgent attacks.

NATO-led forces said in a statement they had killed the father of a Taliban leader during a night raid in Kandahar, after they spotted him holding an AK-47 automatic rifle.   

A spokesman later said they were investigating the incident and the identity of the dead man, following reports he was a relative of Karzai, but declined to comment further.

The president 's spokesman said the president - who has long been a vocal critic of night raids - knew the dead man personally, both as a relative and because they came from the same village.   

Backlash: Haji Yar Mohammad Khan, a cousin of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was 'mistakenly' killed by U.S. special forces in a raid last night

 

Anger: Police stand guard as people remove the bodies of civilians killed after an operation involving Afghan security forces

General Petraeus yesterday outlined several troop withdrawal plans to U.S. President Barack Obama.

He said there was a 26 per cent drop in civilian deaths caused by coalition forces last year, despite an increase in fighting and more intense air and ground campaigns against insurgents.

Rejected: But President Karzai said the apology was not enough and demanded action after a spate of civilian deaths over recent weeks

The UN blamed insurgents for 75 per cent of the 2,770 combat-related killings in 2010.

Militants were responsible for 2,080 deaths, a 28 per cent increase from 2009, while U.S.-led forces were said to have killed 440 people.

President Karzai plans to announce the first areas outside Kabul that will be transferred to Afghan control in a speech on March 21, the start of the Afghan new year.

He said earlier this week he planned to name 'five or six places', but did not give any more details.

That transition is the key to providing an exit strategy for international forces, which hope to transfer full control to Afghan forces by 2014.

There are currently around 105,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, along with around 40,000 NATO troops from other countries.

Gen Petraeus said: 'We hope that by July we will have solidified and even expanded further the security bubbles, the security gains that have been achieved over the course of the last eight to 10 months in particular.'