AFGHANISTAN: Heavy security at funeral for slain peace negotiator
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REPORTING FROM KABUL -- Afghanistan’s capital came to a near standstill Friday as dignitaries and diplomats paid their respects at the flag-draped coffin of the country’s chief peace negotiator, who was killed Tuesday by a suicide bomber.
The funeral service for Burhanuddin Rabbani, held at Afghanistan’s fortress-like presidential palace, prompted some of the heaviest security measures in recent memory in Kabul. Afghan police and soldiers in armored vehicles patrolled the streets, checkpoints dotted major boulevards and traffic circles, and a large part of the city center was blocked to all but foot traffic. Helicopters buzzed overhead.
Rabbani, a former president, was the head of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, set up by the government a year ago to try to open negotiations with the Taliban. He was killed in his home in an affluent Kabul neighborhood by an assailant who claimed to be carrying a peace message from the Taliban leadership, but instead had a bomb concealed in his turban. President Hamid Karzai and other senior Afghan officials have described the assassination plot as an elaborate ruse, months in the making.
Karzai called Rabbani a ‘martyr’ to the cause of peace. His killing is widely viewed as a devastating blow to efforts to start talks with the Taliban. The compound where the assassination took place is only a few blocks from the U.S. Embassy, which itself came under attack on Sept. 13. Insurgents took over an unfinished multistory building nearby and used it as a staging ground to rain rockets on the Embassy compound. Sixteen Afghans -- police and civilians -- were killed.
U.S. officials have blamed the embassy attack on the Haqqani network, a Pakistan-based Taliban offshoot, and have said there is evidence the insurgents were aided by Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, the ISI.
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-- Laura King