Facts still elusive in Kabul death of Swedish reporter

Afghan officials say A spy war involving Western intelligence agents was to blame, not a homegrown cause

Nils Horner. 51, was shot at point-blank range

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG
With few facts emerging about why a Swedish journalist was gunned down on a crowded street here last week, some Afghan officials have begun offering an unsupported, if not familiar, theory: A spy war involving Western intelligence agents was to blame, rather than some homegrown cause.
No officials who offered the theory wanted their names attached to it, and none could say what countries might have been involved in the killing of Nils Horner, 51, a reporter for Swedish Radio. But it opened a new front for speculation in a case swamped with conjecture.

Already, a claim of responsibility by an unconfirmed breakaway Taliban group that accused Horner of being spy has been received and then widely denied — including by the main Taliban spokesman. The timing of the death, on a day that anti-Western demonstrations broke out during the burial of Vice-President Muhammad Qasim Fahim, raised questions about whether growing anger toward foreigners might have led to Horner’s death, but no further detail supports it.

The biggest break so far in the investigation is video of a suspected gunman and an accomplice running from the scene of the crime. The video was captured by a surveillance camera that was mounted near the street by a Western embassy and not by the Afghan government, Afghan and foreign diplomats said.

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Afghan officials now have the video, but have refused to release it. A copy was obtained by the Expressen newspaper of Sweden and posted on its website. The grainy black-and-white video, which Afghan and Western officials said was authentic, shows a pair of men — one in traditional dress, the other in what appears to be a track suit — running down a main street in Kabul’s diplomatic enclave.

The video was taken moments after the shooting, around the time the area had been cordoned off by heavily armed police officers to secure a route for a motorcade carrying senior officials to Fahim’s burial. The suspects ran toward the cordon and, judging from the video, most likely dashed past several police checkpoints as they escaped onto a narrow side street.

Apart from the video, “the facts are thin”, said a European diplomat. “We’re all struggling to explain this.”

Now, some are saying Horner may have been killed as part of some shadowy intelligence war in Afghanistan waged by foreigners.

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The European diplomat described the claim that Horner was an intelligence agent as “delusional nonsense”. “We’re all tired of people thinking that the Great Game is being played out here every day,” the diplomat said.

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