Afghan Government Says Prisoner Directed Attacks
By ROD NORDLAND and SHARIFULLAH SAHAK
KABUL, Afghanistan — A cell of suicide bombers active in Kabul was run for three years by a Taliban commander operating from the city’s main prison, Afghan officials said Thursday.
Musadeq Sadeq/Associated Press
Mohammed Khan confessed to a role in a January attack.
Another suicide bomber cell recruited young men from religious schools, and got them high on a drug that made them enraptured by the handlers who were trying to persuade them to commit mayhem.
Those were among the highlights of an extraordinary news conference held on Thursday by Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security. It was meant to expose the workings of the two cells, but raised nearly as many questions as it answered.
Not least of these was how Talib Jan, the jailed Taliban commander, was able to run his network from Pul-e-Charkhi, a maximum security prison in Kabul, which is staffed by Afghan police and military officials with American trainers and advisers.
“From inside the Pul-e-Charkhi prison he was appointing people and giving them targets and instructions: do this, and do that,” said a National Directorate of Security spokesman, Lutfullah Mashal.
“Most of the terrorist and suicide attacks in Kabul were planned from inside this prison by this man,” he asserted.
Mr. Mashal played a videotaped confession of Mr. Jan admitting as much, and saying that he had organized the suicide bombing of the Finest Supermarket in Kabul on Jan. 28, which killed 14 people. His confederate, Mohammed Khan, who was said to have visited Mr. Jan in prison to take his orders, confessed in person at the news conference to his part in the bombing.
There was no way to independently verify the confessions. Confessions obtained by coercion or torture are common in Afghanistan. A request to interview the would-be suicide bombers was turned down.
The authorities’ investigation of that case led them to a second suicide bomb cell, this one with eight bombers being readied to attack American bases in Kabul and Logar Provinces. Five of its members, including a safe house operator, a transporter and two youthful would-be bombers, confessed to their roles at the news conference.
Both cells, the authorities said, were part of the Haqqani network, a Taliban-allied group based in Pakistan.
The two would-be bombers, both Afghans, one 20 and the other 17, said they had been recruited from madrasas, religious schools where their families had sent them to study in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where extremists are active.
Mahmadullah, the 17-year-old, from Logar Province, related his recruitment at a madrasa in Miram Shah, in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan. He said he and three other recruits were given a succession of injections in both arms of a drug that was red, but of unknown composition. “Whenever we got these injections, whatever they said we felt happy and loved to hear what they said, loved to listen to them, and swore we would do whatever they said to do.”
What followed was a succession of trips from one mullah to another in Pakistan, where they were shown Taliban propaganda videos of fights with Americans, in between religious indoctrination featuring long recitations from the Koran, Mr. Mahmadullah said. Like many Afghans, he has only one name.
One reporter asked him if all the students at the madrasa were recruited. “No, they just picked and chose among us,” Mr. Mahmadullah said.
“You mean they just picked the stupid ones,” an Afghan reporter said, to laughter.
“Yes, only the fools like these two,” Mr. Mashal said.
The second would-be suicide bomber, Lal Mohammad Khan, 20, from Spinbaldak in Kandahar Province, was also recruited at a madrasa, in Chaman, just across the Pakistani border. He was less garrulous than Mr. Mahmadullah, despite Mr. Mashal’s effort to prod him into talking. “I want to go home and surrender myself to my family,” he said.
When an Afghan reporter from the Voice of America asked him, “People say you should be hanged as a lesson to others, what do you say?” Mr. Khan just hung his head.
Mr. Mahmadullah was more forthcoming.
He described in great detail the final days of his training, in which he was taught how to make a suicide vest, with sticks of TNT interwoven with Primacord — a detonating cord with high explosives — and with one strand of the cord extending down his right sleeve to a button to be held in his wrist. The National Directorate of Security then raided the cell’s safe house and arrested them.
“When we were arrested, we were very happy,” he said. “Thank God for N.D.S. — my life has been rescued. It is only because of God and N.D.S. that I have survived; otherwise I would be dead by now.”
In the case of Mr. Jan, who was said to have run his suicide bomber cell from inside prison, the deputy director of security at that prison, Gen. Mohammad Ibrahim Rahmani, reached by telephone, was unsurprised by the claims.
While prisoners are allowed visitors and phone calls three days a week, they are supposed to be monitored by guards. General Rahmani noted, however, that Mr. Jan had briefly escaped from the prison a year ago, but was recaptured. Related to that escape, 18 prison officers, one of them a colonel, were arrested on suspicion of corruption and taking bribes from detainees. General Rahmani said all 18 were themselves now prisoners there.
Separately, a district governor was killed by a Taliban suicide bomber in northern Kunduz Province on Thursday, a day after the governor of the province publicly boasted that Kunduz had been completely cleared of insurgents.
The bomber detonated a suicide vest at the office of the district governor of Chardara, Abdul Wahid Omar Khail, killing him and six others, according to Gen. Abdul Rahman Aqtash, the deputy police chief of Kunduz Province.
A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahid, claimed responsibility for the attack.
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