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Warlords get away with murder in Afghanistan

One late-spring evening last year, five employees of Doctors Without Borders were ambushed on their way home from a rural clinic in northwestern Afghanistan and shot to death in their car. Ten months later their killers remain at large, and the man suspected of being behind the attack has been reappointed police chief of his district.

The case highlights the lawlessness of much of Afghanistan, where crimes frequently go unsolved and where the armed and powerful get away with murder. A month after the ambush, which took place on June 2, Doctors Without Borders, one of the largest and most respected medical charities in the world and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 for its work, pulled out of Afghanistan to protest the government's failure to conduct a credible investigation.

Afghan government officials told the charity shortly after the attack that they had evidence that a local strongman was behind the killings, and also provided the names of two of the suspected gunmen involved, the organization said. Yet the Afghan authorities have done little to bring the perpetrators to justice, said Kenny Gluck, the group's director of operations.

Doctors Without Borders "is frustrated and angry that there has not been adequate investigation or prosecution," Gluck said recently in an e-mail message.

The killings were clearly carefully planned, Gluck and Western diplomats have said. Two to four gunmen on motorbikes stopped the car used by the team from the charity's Dutch branch as it was making a trip to Qala-i-Nau, the capital of Badghis province, in western Afghanistan, from a clinic in the village of Khairkhana. The gunmen shot the car's occupants, walking around the vehicle as they fired.

Those killed were Helene de Beir, 29, of Belgium; Dr. Egil Tynaes, 62, of Norway; Pim Kwint, 39, of the Netherlands; and two Afghans, Besmillah, the driver; and Fasil Ahmad, an interpreter.

At the time, Amir Shah Nayebzada, the police chief of Badghis province, where the attack took place, blamed the Taliban, and a Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the killings.

But people who saw the incident told a different story, saying the gunmen worked for Hajji Yacoub, who had shortly before been removed from his post as police chief of Qadis district and had threatened that security would quickly deteriorate under his successor.

In an interview last year, Afghanistan's interior minister, Ali Ahmed Jalali, confirmed that Yacoub was a suspect in the killings. But Yacoub was neither detained nor questioned in the months after the attack, Nayebzada said. Thirteen people were arrested soon after the killings, but the prosecutor's office released them without charge for lack of evidence, Nayebzada said.
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