Hundreds of Afghan protesters ransacked Pakistan's embassy in Kabul on Tuesday morning, shattering windows, breaking down doors and setting the Pakistani flag on fire.
No one was injured in the rampage, but Pakistani officials bitterly accused the Afghan government of being unable to police its own capital, demanded compensation and said the embassy would remain closed until further notice.
"Where was the Afghan government?" asked Rustam Shah Mehmand, the Pakistani ambassador, as he stood among shattered windows and overturned tables.
PHOTO: AP
The current tension between the countries stems from allegations that Pakistan is allowing Taliban fighters to use its territory as a safe haven from which to carry out attacks on US and Afghan forces in southeastern Afghanistan. There have also been reported skirmishes between Afghan and Pakistani forces along the countries' lawless and disputed border.
Pakistani officials say they have posted 70,000 troops in the tribal areas along the border to stop the incursions, the first time in Pakistan's history army troops have entered the tribal areas. They say they have arrested more than 500 suspected members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but that it is impossible to completely seal the mountainous border.
About 9:30am, 500 protesters chanting "death to Pakistan" descended on the Pakistani Embassy. Afghan officials were aware of the protest, a Western diplomat said. But they apparently assigned no extra police officers.
The crowd quickly overwhelmed the 10 to 15 officers present, tearing down a wooden gate and a crude stone wall behind it. As hundred of looters swarmed the compound, a dozen or so Pakistanis cowered in the basement. The ambassador was not in the embassy at the time.
Estimates of how long the crowd ransacked the building varied from 20 minutes to two hours. The protesters hurled two satellite dishes off the roof and smashed the windshields of seven four-wheel-drive cars.
At the heart of the current dispute are two divergent views of the situation in Afghanistan. Officials in Kabul say Afghan and American forces are making steady progress in countering a low-level insurgency in southeastern Afghanistan. But officials in Islamabad say lawlessness is spreading, ethnic Pashtuns deeply resent the US presence and that support for the Taliban's strict style of law and order governance is growing.
In a news conference Tuesday afternoon, Karzai apologized for the attack and condemned those who carried it out. He promised to call Musharraf and apologize and to pay Pakistan compensation.
"Those who did this action today are not enemies of Pakistan," he said. "They are, in fact, enemies of Afghanistan."
The dispute began last week when Musharraf said in Germany that a far larger international force was needed in Afghanistan, where warlords, not Karzai's government, controlled most of the country.
The Western diplomat said on Tuesday that Karzai was "very incensed" by Musharraf's comments. He said the general had made similar comments in the past and Karzai had asked him to not do it again.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS