Taliban militants kill Afghan soldier at site of rampage

BALANDI, Afghanistan -- Taliban militants opened fire Tuesday on an Afghan government delegation visiting one of the two villages in southern Afghanistan where a U.S. soldier is suspected of killing 16 civilians.

The gunfire killed an Afghan soldier who was providing security for the delegation in Balandi village, said Gen. Abdul Razaq, the police chief for Kandahar province where the visit took place. Another Afghan soldier and a military prosecutor were wounded in the attack, he said.

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The delegation, which included two of President Hamid Karzai's brothers and other senior officials, was holding a memorial service in a mosque for the civilians killed Sunday when the shooting started.

One of the president's brothers, Qayum Karzai, said the attack didn't seem serious to him.

"We were giving them our condolences, then we heard two very, very light shots," said Karzai. "Then we assumed that it was the national army that started to fire in the air."

He said the members of the delegation, which also included Kandahar governor Tooryalai Wesa and Minister of Border and Tribal Affairs Asadullah Khalid, were safe and headed back to Kandahar city.

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Before the attack, the Taliban vowed to kill and behead those responsible for the civilian deaths in the two villages in Panjwai district, considered the birthplace of the militant group.

Nine of the 16 killed were children, and three were women, according to Karzai.

The U.S. has an Army staff sergeant in custody who is suspected of carrying out the killings before dawn Sunday but has not released his name.

Villagers have described him stalking from house to house in the middle of the night, opening fire on sleeping families and then burning some of the bodies of the dead afterward.

Also Tuesday, hundreds of students in eastern Afghanistan staged the first significant protest in response to the tragedy, shouting angry slogans against the U.S. and the American soldier suspected in the civilian killings.

The killings have caused outrage in Afghanistan but have not sparked the kind of violent protests seen last month after American soldiers burned Muslim holy books and other Islamic texts.

The more muted response could be a result of Afghans being used to dealing with civilian casualties in over a decade of war. Some have said the slayings in Panjwai were more in keeping with Afghans' experience of deadly night raids and airstrikes by U.S.-led forces than the Koran burnings were.

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American goes on shooting rampage in Afghanistan: officials

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

An American Army soldier went on a shooting rampage in Afghanistan, killing at least 16 people including nine children after breaking into their homes in a village near his base, Afghan and U.S. officials said Sunday.

The soldier, who has not been identified, is in NATO custody and the incident is being investigated, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) coalition said.

Officials say the U.S. military there is treating at least five wounded.

“I wish to convey my profound regrets and dismay at the actions apparently taken by one coalition member in Kandahar province," said a statement from Lt. Gen. Adrian Bradshaw, the deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan. “One of our soldiers is reported to have killed and injured a number of civilians in villages adjacent to his base. I cannot explain the motivation behind such callous acts, but they were in no way part of authorized ISAF military activity.”

Tooryalai Wesa, governor of Kandahar province, told The Associated Press that a group of officials had gone to the base to determine exactly what happened.

GRAPHIC WARNING: The bodies of Afghan civilians allegedly shot by U.S. service member. (Mamoon Durrani/AFP/Getty Images)

"The incident happened. There are some people killed, some wounded. But I don't have the details," he said in a phone interview.

The shootings occurred around 3 a.m. in Panjwai district of Kandahar province, in a village about 500 yards from a U.S. base, AP reported.

An AP photographer reported seeing 15 bodies of Afghans that villagers claimed were killed by an American service member.

The photographer saw the bodies — some of them burned and some covered with blankets — in the villages of Alkozai and Balandi.

With News Wire Services

msheridan@nydailynews.com; or follow him at Twitter.com/NYDNSheridan

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