HUNDREDS of angry men tried to storm a NATO base in Afghanistan after a shootout left three Spaniards and an Afghan police trainee dead.
The Afghan policeman killed two Spanish paramilitary police officers and a Spanish interpreter during a training session at the small base in the province of Badghis before security forces shot him dead, Afghan and Spanish authorities said.
Hundreds of Afghan men then tried to overrun the Spanish-administered base in protest at the killing of the local officer, in an incident that left more than two dozen men injured, police and doctors said.
“We have 25 people admitted to our hospitals. Some of them suffer from bullet wounds, others from injuries caused by rocks and sticks,” said Abdul Aziz Tareq, the provincial public health chief. Television footage showed crowds of angry men in turbans and shalwar kameez throwing rocks at the front gate of the base.
“In a class, one of the students apparently opened fire on the two Civil Guard policemen and the interpreter, who was also Spanish, and killed all three,” Spain’s Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said on radio. “The security forces in turn repulsed the attack, fired on the assailant and killed him.”
NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, to which the officers were assigned, said two of its service members along with a civilian and an Afghan police officer were killed in what it called a “shooting incident”.
“The cause of the shooting incident is still unclear,” it said in a statement. Citing “reports”, it said an Afghan police officer had fired at his trainers before he was killed in return fire.
The Taliban claimed the Afghan police officer who killed the Spaniards had a “special connection” to their group, according to the SITE monitoring service.
SITE quoted a statement posted on the Taliban website, from spokesman Zabihullah, saying the officer “always said that he will take revenge against the occupying soldiers after he had seen with his own eyes the injustices and the conduct of the occupiers towards the innocent residents”.
Mr Rubalcaba called the killing of the police officers and interpreter an act of terrorism. “I can’t say whether the Taliban was behind it or not, (but) what is clear is that it was a premeditated attack…, it was a terrorist attack,” he told a news conference.
He said the government was trying to find out “who ordered it”. Abdul Rauf Ahmadi, a police spokesman for western Afghanistan, said the shooting erupted after an argument between the Spanish and Afghan police during the training session. He said hundreds of residents tried to storm the base in the provincial capital Qal-i-Naw in protest at the death of the trainee, before Afghan police, the army and Western troops dispersed the crowd.
“Three youths were injured during the demonstrations,” he said. ISAF said “a demonstration occurred near the camp where the shooting happened”. Afghan police officers and army soldiers have been behind several attacks in recent months in which they have targeted their Western counterparts. In July an Afghan police officer killed three British Gurkhas in the southern province of Helmand, a hotbed of the Taliban insurgency.
After killing the Gurkhas, the officer fled amid reports suggesting he had joined the Taliban, though this could not be confirmed. Spain has 1,555 troops serving in ISAF, part of a 141,000-strong US-led NATO force deployed in Afghanistan to battle a Taliban-led insurgency nearing the end of its ninth year.
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