Rogue policeman shoots dead two US soldiers as Koran riots rage across Afghanistan
Two American soldiers have been shot dead by a rogue Afghan police officer, even as thousands of demonstrators turned out for a fourth day of protests against the burning of a Koran by a fundamentalist cleric in Florida.
4:43PM BST 04 Apr 2011
Abdul Sattar Bariz, the deputy governor of the northern province of Faryab, said the two soldiers were killed at border check post where they were instructing newly recruited Afghan police personnel.
There were, however, conflicting accounts of who the perpetrator might have been.
The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force said it was investigating the shooting, which it said was carried out by "an individual in an Afghan Border Police uniform."
But General Habib Sayedkhel, a senior border police official, said the shots that killed the soldiers were fired from a nearby house.
"After the shooting the soldier jumped down and ran away to save his life," he said. "There was no evidence that he killed the Americans."
Fears have been mounting that rapid recruitment into the Afghan security forces, which are due to be boosted to at least 305,000 before western troops withdraw from Afghanistan, has allowed the Taliban to infiltrate sympathisers into the police and army.
Afghan authorities began tighter vetting of recruits after a renegade soldier killed five British troops in 2009, but at least a dozen instructors have been killed in similar incidents over the past year.
The shootings came as rioting, which has claimed over 20 lives and left 150 injured, continued across Afghanistan.
In the eastern city of Jalalabad, up to a thousand protesters blocked the main highway to Kabul and set alight effigies of Terry Jones, the evangelical preacher who supervised the burning of a copy of the Koran in Florda last month.
Protesters in Lashkar Gah, in the southern province of Helmand, dispersed after shots were fired by police, killing two suicide bombers who were attempting to infiltrate the demonstration.
Twelve people died in Kandahar over the weekend, when demonstrators waving Taliban flags and shouting "Death to America" burned cars, smashed shops and sacked a high school for girls.
Seven UN staff were killed on Friday, along with five Afghans, after demonstrators overran their office in the normally-peaceful city of Mazar-e-Sharif.
