Assassination suspects freed by Afghan officials

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Afghan authorities, at the urging of international investigators, have released suspects held in connection with last month's assassination of Vice President Abdul Qadir, the international peacekeeping force here reported Sunday.

An investigation conducted by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) "found no evidence linking detainees arrested with regard to the assassination ... " the ISAF statement said.

Sunday's statement did not say how many were released or when.

Knowledgeable government officials could not be reached immediately for additional details.

Qadir, one of five Afghan vice presidents and also the national public works minister, was shot dead July 6 outside his office by two men who fled the scene. He had no bodyguards with him at the time.

He was the second government minister assassinated as the interim government of President Hamid Karzai has sought to establish its authority in the aftermath of the ouster of the Taliban government last December.

The killing last January of the aviation and tourism minister, Abdul Rahman, also remains unsolved.

Suspicions in Qadir's death point in many directions in fractious post-Taliban Afghanistan. Hundreds of people have demonstrated repeatedly in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, where Qadir served as governor, demanding that the central government solve the case.

The ISAF statement said its investigation of the Qadir killing, conducted at Karzai's request, had been concluded and a report was submitted to the government on Saturday.

It did not identify a perpetrator, but did find critical deficiencies in the personal security system surrounding government leaders, ISAF said.

A "pattern of events" on the day of the assassination resulted in Qadir's "being left almost entirely without effective security," it said. But it found no evidence that protection had been deliberately withdrawn.

The ISAF command, responsible for overall security in Kabul, had criticized security for government ministers earlier as well in the wake of the Qadir assassination, and instituted an intensive training program for official Afghan bodyguards.

In addition, U.S. special forces soldiers, part of the American combat deployment here, not of ISAF, were assigned to personal protection duty for President Karzai.