KABUL, 9 January 2005 — Afghan intelligence officials have arrested a Supreme Court judge for links to the deadly car bombing of a US security contractor which killed at least nine people last year, a court official said yesterday. The arrest of the judge, identified as Naqibullah, comes a week after authorities announced the arrest of two Al-Qaeda militants in connection with the bombing of the US firm Dyncorp which trains the Afghan police force and provides President Hamid Karzai’s personal bodyguard.
At least nine people, including three Americans, were killed in the Aug. 29 car bomb attack. Naqibullah, who goes by one name, was arrested after intelligence agents questioned the two other suspects, Supreme Court spokesman Waheed Mujda told AFP. “The two other suspects who were arrested earlier told security agencies that the judge had links with them,” Mujda said.
He said explosives were found in Naqibullah’s house during a search operation by intelligence agents. “The operation took place on the night of Jan. 3 and was directed by Afghan intelligence,” said NATO peacekeeping force spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Ken MacKillop, adding that international troops were not involved.
Naqibullah was serving as head of the Primary Court of Panjshir province, north of Kabul, Mujda added. Mohammed Haider, a Tajik national, and another man were detained weeks earlier for orchestrating the Dyncorp attack and a suicide bombing in Kabul’s Chicken Street shopping area.
The attack on the US security contractor, the biggest in the Afghan capital last year, and the suicide bombing in October shortly after the country’s first presidential election raised jitters.
Afghan intelligence officials confirmed they had pulled in two suspects linked to the Dyncorp blast but released no further details. Naqibullah, a 65-year-old preliminary court judge, was detained about two weeks ago after two men accused of organizing the bombing told investigators they had lodged at the judge’s house in the Afghan capital, said Gen. Abdul Fatah, a senior Afghan prosecutor.
“He is accused of two things. First, he let the terrorists stay in his house. Second, he was aware of their activities but didn’t inform anyone,” Fatah told the Associated Press. Naqibullah was the head of a preliminary court in the Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul, Fatah said.
Fatah said an accomplice, Abdul Ahad, was arrested along with him. Both Ahad and Naqibullah hail from the same district of Afghanistan’s Kapisa province, he said. The suicide bomber and the two organizers “stayed in his (Naqibullah’s) house all the time, from the beginning to the end of their mission,” spanning both attacks, Fatah said.
Fatah said Attaullah was an Iraqi national and identified the suicide bomber as a Kashmiri named Akbar. “First, they brought another guy, also a foreigner, but in the end he didn’t want to do it. So they took him back to Peshawar and brought Akbar,” Fatah said. “All three received their orders from Attaullah. He is an Iraqi who is outside the country. Without any doubt he is a member of Al-Qaeda.”
Meanwhile, Berlin is worried that German forces in Afghanistan will be exposed to greater danger this year as a result of the aim of the United States and Britain to move more aggressively against drug warlords, the weekly magazine Der Spiegel reports.
In its latest issue, the magazine said that German intelligence had cautioned the military to expect greater danger at the German bases in Kundus and Faizabad in northeastern Afghanistan if the drug warlords start to feel threatened.
