KABUL (AFP) — An Afghan provincial police chief and up to nine of his men were killed in a shoot-out with armed guards from a private security company in the southern city of Kandahar Monday, authorities said.
The gunfight erupted outside the offices of the provincial attorney general in Kandahar, which has suffered heavily from violence linked to a Taliban-led insurgency.
The Afghan guards went to the offices to free a prisoner when the attorney general's staff called for police help, said interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary.
"The Kandahar police chief came to the area to assess the situation himself," Bashary told AFP.
"As he arrives, these armed men open fire and start a clash as a result of which the police chief, the police criminal investigation chief and two other policemen have been killed," he said.
Five more policemen were wounded, he added.
Bashary could not immediately say if the men who killed the police chief had managed to escape or take the prisoner they were after.
The head of the Kandahar provincial council, Ahmad Wali Karzai, put the death toll at 10 policemen, including the two senior officers.
"In a shoot-out between Afghan private security guards and police, 10 policemen including Kandahar police chief Mutaiullah Khan Qateh and the criminal investigation police chief have been killed," said Karzai.
The guards had been trained by US soldiers, said Karzai, a brother of President Hamid Karzai.
The president demanded the "immediate handover by the coalition forces to the Afghan government of the private security guards involved in the killing of Kandahar province security officials," his office said.
"President Karzai said that such incidents negatively impact the state-building process in Afghanistan and called upon coalition forces to avoid actions that weaken the government," it said in a statement.
The statement put the death toll at five.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said that none of its troops or those from the separate US-led coalition were involved.
"There have been Afghan police deaths but there was no ISAF or coalition involvement at all," Lieutenant Commander Chris Hall told AFP.
Qateh, believed to be in his mid-50s, held the rank of general. He was appointed Kandahar police chief about a year ago after a Taliban attack on Kandahar city jail that allowed hundreds of inmates to escape.
A Taliban spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, claimed men from his militia had deliberately sparked the clash between the Afghan forces but this was not confirmed.
The Taliban have in the past falsely claimed involvement in incidents or exaggerated clashes.
Fears of mounting unrest have grown ahead of key presidential and provincial council elections in Afghanistan in August.
President Karzai has called on the Taliban and members of other insurgent groups to vote in the elections on August 20 while Western militaries based in Afghanistan have sought troop reinforcements to secure the polls.
Kandahar is a tense city and capital of the eponymous province where the Al-Qaeda-linked Taliban movement emerged in the early 1990s.
The fight against extremists in Afghanistan has brought around 90,000 foreign soldiers to the destitute country, most of them Americans serving in a NATO force, a separate US-led coalition or as Special Forces.
Many units of foreign troops employ Afghan guards to work with them.
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