Insider attack kills 3 high-level provincial leaders at Afghan security meeting; top U.S. commander unharmed

Show Caption Hide Caption Inside job kills 3 Afghan leaders, US Army General survives Three top provincial leaders, including the governor and a widely-known police chief, were killed and two Americans injured by Afghan bodyguards at a security conference in Kandahar.

WASHINGTON – Three top provincial leaders – including the governor and a fearsome police chief – were killed and two Americans injured Thursday in an inside attack by Afghan bodyguards at a security conference in Kandahar. Army Gen. Scott Miller, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, was also at the meeting, but was unharmed.

Agha Lala Dastageri, Kandahar’s deputy provincial governor, said powerful provincial police chief Abdul Raziq was among the dead, along with Kandahar Gov. Zalmay Wesa, who died of his wounds at a nearby hospital.

Dastageri said provincial intelligence chief Abdul Mohmin also died inside the governor’s residential compound where the attack occurred.

U.S. officials disputed a claim by a Taliban spokesman that Miller, the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, was the target of the attack.

The two injured Americans included a service member and a civilian, according to Col. David Butler, a spokesperson for U.S. Forces-Afghanistan. A contractor from a NATO coalition partner also was injured.

"This was an Afghan-on-Afghan incident," Butler said in a statement, adding that the two wounded Americans had been "medically evacuated and are stable."

"Gen. Miller is uninjured," Butler said. "We are being told the area is secure."

The spokesman said "the attacker" is dead, although it appears that several bodyguards of Wesa’s elite guard unit were involved in the melee when they turned their guns on the dignitaries at the conference.

In a telephone interview with The Associated Press, the spokesman for the Taliban in Afghanistan’s southern region, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, said the Taliban carried out the attack. He said Miller, who took command of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan last month, was the target.

Butler, however, said in his statement that "Afghan officials were the target of the violence."

Miller, 57, has been on the leading edge of major combat operations dating to Somalia. He was also among the first U.S. troops to deploy to Afghanistan after the 9/11 terror attacks. Prior to taking command in Afghanistan, Miller led the Joint Special Operations Command, the military’s elite commando units that deploy around the world.



In Somalia, Miller led soldiers in the harrowing battle in Mogadishu that became central to the book and movie, “Black Hawk Down.” During that fight, 18 U.S. troops were killed and as many as 1,000 insurgents were killed.

He recalled the fierce fighting that day at a reunion of troops in 2015, according to a story on the Army’s website.

"What drove me and filled me with peace that day was I never thought we were going to be overrun,” Miller said. “Not with the guys I was with. If something had happened to me and I died, I knew I was going home. Because someone was going to get me home. That's a relationship piece that is really, really hard to explain.”

Vanden Brook reported from Washington; Stanglin from McLean, Va. Contributing: The Associated Press

