WASHINGTON, 15 October 2004 — Army criminal investigators have recommended that the service consider disciplinary action against more than 20 US troops in the 2002 deaths of two prisoners in Afghanistan, defense officials said yesterday. The move follows Army charges filed earlier against a US military police sergeant in the alleged abuse deaths of the two detainees at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul.
It also marked the latest step by the US military against soldiers involved in the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The defense officials, who asked not to be identified, gave no details of the report by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. But the service planned an announcement shortly that could include recommendations for charges ranging from unintentional homicide to dereliction of duty in the deaths, they said.
One of the officials said the report included evidence that could support serious criminal charges in some cases. The soldiers, believed to include both military police and intelligence troops, will not be identified because commanders have not reviewed the report and no charges have been filed.
The two prisoners died on Dec. 4 and Dec. 10, 2002, after blunt force injuries, according to the Army. Military medical examiners classified their deaths as homicides. Sgt. James Boland, an Army reservist in the 377th Military Police Company, was earlier charged with assault, maltreatment and dereliction of duty in the deaths, the US Army Forces Command at Fort McPherson, Georgia, said last month.
Army officials told Reuters then that perhaps several dozen troops from Boland’s Cincinnati-based unit, as well as the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, could face charges. Boland was ordered to Fort Knox, Kentucky, while his case is pending.
Meanwhile, the first results released in Afghanistan’s presidential election put President Hamid Karzai in the lead after 7,513 votes were counted in the northern province of Kunduz, Afghanistan’s electoral commission said in Kabul yesterday.
The Afghan Joint Electoral Management Body website showed Karzai, considered the favorite to win the war-torn country’s first election, had garnered 54.7 percent of the total with 4004 votes.
Trailing Karzai in second place with 20.1 percent of the vote was ethnic Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum while the man seen as Karzai’s chief rival Yunus Qanuni only won 14.4 percent of the vote.
In Kunduz province, which was the first of five regional counting centers to begin counting votes, 7,314 votes were consider valid while 217 ballot papers were declared invalid. The Kunduz results represent only a tiny fraction of the ballots due to be counted across Afghanistan in coming days, and only 3 percent of the votes due to be counted in the province itself.
So far, over 22,000 polling stations nationwide have sent ballot boxes by donkey, jeep and helicopter to be counted and 9,917 stations have had their ballot boxes opened and ballots checked, sorted and prepared for counting. With less than half the polling stations accounted for voter turnout was 3,393,856, according to the UN-backed electoral commission website.
In fourth and fifth place, respectively, were ethnic Hazara military strongman Mohammed Mohaqeq with 2.8 percent of the vote and the country’s only female presidential candidate Massooda Jalal.
The count from Saturday’s historic ballot was put on hold while diplomats lobbied key opposition candidates to drop calls for a boycott over charges of multiple voting and other irregularities, and an international panel was set up to probe their complaints.
The possible boycott threatened to undermine the credibility of the shattered central Asian state’s first exercise in democracy after colonial rule, monarchies, a communist regime, Soviet occupation, civil war and Taleban repression.
It also cast a pall over the jubilation of voters who flocked to 5,000 polling stations, braving dust-storms in the south and snow in remote Hindu Kush villages and defying threats of sabotage, which never materialized, from bitter Taleban loyalists. Counting began in five of the eight counting centers across the country and was set to begin in the remaining ones on Saturday, after a break for the start of the Muslim holy month Ramadan today, UN electoral staff said.
Men and women sat together, something not normally seen in conservative Afghanistan, as they went through the ballots. Some women wore makeup and had their hair uncovered, unheard of under the previous Taleban regime.
“I am very happy to be counting votes because this is the first time Afghanistan has had an election and now there will be big changes,” said one election worker, Abdul Wali. The counting was given the go-ahead earlier yesterday as a UN-appointed panel of three international experts set up to study the complaints announced it would isolate ballot boxes it wanted to investigate. The rest of the boxes were released for counting.
“Ballot boxes that are not being held for investigations (will) return to the normal flow of the counting process,” said an official from the joint Afghan-UN election commission. The international panel extended a deadline for complaints to be lodged until 6:00 p.m. yesterday (1330 GMT).
By the first deadline Tuesday 43 complaints from at least four candidates had been filed. They included Karzai, Qanuni, Mohaqeq, and an ethnic Tajik doctor and lecturer, Ghulam Farooq Nijrabi. The main concern was that ink used to stain voters’ fingers and prevent multiple voting was found to wash off.
