KABUL, 16 February — Afghanistan’s interim leader Hamid Karzai said yesterday that rogue senior security officials of the Afghan interim administration assassinated Aviation and Tourism Minister Abdul Rahman.

In a statement read out on his behalf by Culture Minister Sayed Raheem, Karzai said four people had been arrested, among them two military generals.

Another three had escaped with Afghans who went for Haj, he said, adding the Saudi authorities had been asked to repatriate the fugitives. Karzai said the killing had been carried out “for personal reasons.”

Speaking after the statement had been read, Karzai told reporters that the case against those arrested was based on “absolute, multiple eyewitness accounts.” The killing “had nothing to do with Haj pilgrims,” Karzai said.

Earlier, officials had said Rahman was beaten to death by furious pilgrims who had waited more than two days for a flight to the Kingdom.

In another development, Afghan police fired shots into the air and set off smoke bombs to control fans as a long-awaited “Game of Unity” between a Kabul team and foreign troops degenerated into mayhem yesterday. German and Dutch soldiers used batons and shields to hold back thousands of people without tickets to the match, some of whom threw stones at them and into the stadium.

Several times the peacekeepers fired shots into the air to warn off crowds attempting to surge through several entrances.

“That is within the rules of engagement,” said Lt. Col. Thomas Loebbering, a German military spokesman.

He said there were around 700 German, Dutch and British peacekeepers together with around 800 Afghan soldiers and police providing security.

The Afghan police were seen beating men and children with clubs and rifle butts outside the stadium. Some of the public were injured and had to be helped away from the melee.

At least one ISAF peacekeeper, either German or Dutch, suffered a bloody nose during a scuffle, one witness said.

More than 30,000 tickets were sold for the match between Kabul United and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF), but perhaps twice that number showed up at the stadium in southern Kabul hoping to get in.

The ISAF team won the game 3-1.

In Chaman, Pakistani security forces swooped on a house near the Afghan border, seizing a provincial governor from Afghanistan’s former ruling Taleban, a security official said yesterday.

Mulla Khairullah Khairkhawah, the Taleban’s ex-governor of western Herat province, was caught on Thursday evening as he tried to scale a wall in Hasan Kalay village, some two km from the southwestern Pakistani border town of Chaman, the official said.

He added Khairkhawah had been hiding in a house belonging to a relative for several days. “We caught him as he was trying to scale a wall to escape,” he said.

Khairkhawah is the latest senior Taleban official to be detained in Pakistan since the collapse of the regime late last year.

Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said yesterday he thought a six-month UN Security Council mandate for international troops to restore peace in the Afghan capital Kabul would be extended.