Afghan president snubs allegation as politically motivated
WASHINGTON: A brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Ahmed Wali Karzai, may be involved in illegal drug trade, prompting serious concern among top US officials, The New York Times reported on its website on Saturday.
Citing unnamed US officials, the newspaper said the US ambassador to Afghanistan, the Central Intelligence Agency’s station chief and their British counterparts, discussed the allegations against Ahmed Wali Karzai with Hamid Karzai as far back as 2006.
But the Afghan premier has so far resisted calls to move his brother out of the country, arguing he had not seen any conclusive evidence against him.
“We thought the concern expressed to Karzai might be enough to get him out of there,” the paper quotes a US official as saying. But “we don’t have the kind of hard, direct evidence that you could take to get a criminal indictment. That allows Karzai to say,
‘Where’s your proof?’”
But indirect evidence against Ahmed Wali Karzai continues to mount. When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander Habibullah Jan received a call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, asking him to release the drugs, The Times said.
Two years later, US and Afghan counter-narcotics forces stopped another truck near Kabul and discovered more than 50 kgs of heroin in it. After that seizure, the report said, US investigators discovered links between the shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Karzai.
