The Afghan government has dropped all charges in the controversial corruption case against an aide to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said the official whose office oversaw the case.
The arrest in late July of the aide, Mohammed Zia Salehi by US-backed corruption investigators was an embarrassment, first because of the president’s decision to intervene publicly to have Salehi released from prison and then because of revelations that Salehi had also been on the payroll of the CIA.
Seeking to counter accusations that the Karzai government had gone soft on corruption, the official handling Salehi’s case, Afghan Deputy Attorney General Rahmatullah Nazari, said the authorities had corruption investigations at various stages directed against 20 senior officials in all, including two sitting members of the Karzai Cabinet.
That includes indictments that have now been prepared against two former Afghan ministers, who will be brought to court in the next week or two, Nazari said.
In Salehi’s case, Karzai had said he intervened only to release him from prison because he was angered by what he called the heavy-handed way the arrest was carried out by the Major Crimes Task Force, the US-backed unit that built the case against Salehi.
Salehi was then placed under house arrest and ordered to report to the attorney general’s office regularly. Karzai said he would not try to interfere in the legal case against the aide.
On Monday, Nazari said in response to questions during a telephone interview that all charges had been dropped against Salehi.
“He is a free man,” he said.
Dismissal of the charges was not previously publicized.
Salehi, the chief of administration in the president’s National Security Council, had been caught on a wiretap carried out by the Major Crimes Task Force soliciting a bribe to intervene in an investigation into the role of a politically well-connected money transfer company in exporting large amounts of cash from the country.
Nazari, however, said that Afghan law allowed wiretapping evidence to be used only in drug cases, so investigators did not have a corruption case that would stand up in court.
Although Karzai acknowledged having directly contacted the office of the attorney general to win Salehi’s release, Nazari said that the president had not made any further contact regarding the subsequent legal proceedings.
A source close to the Major Crimes Task Force said the unit was unaware that charges against Salehi had been dropped.
“Once the case has been presented to the attorney general’s office, it is completely up to them how to proceed,” the source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Nazari also said there had been no contact from the president’s office about the cases against other prominent Afghan officials, whom he said included military generals, deputy ministers, a governor and an ambassador. Of those, four have been jailed and three are still in the midst of court proceedings, while investigations are at various stages for the other 11.
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