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Afghan policemen stand guard at the entrance to police headquarters in Kabul today.
KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan policewoman shot and killed an American adviser outside the police headquarters in Kabul on Monday, the latest in a rising tide of insider attacks by Afghans against their foreign allies, senior Afghan officials said.
The killing of the American, who worked as a contractor with the NATO command, was the first known insider attack by a woman in Afghanistan.
The woman, identified as Afghan police Sgt. Nargas, had entered a strategic compound in the heart of the capital and shot the civilian adviser with a pistol as he came out of a small shop with articles he had just bought, Kabul Governor Abdul Jabar Taqwa told The Associated Press.
Earlier, she had asked bystanders where the governor's office was located, the governor said. As many Afghans, the policewoman uses only one name.
The policewoman was taken into Afghan custody shortly after the attack but Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqi said that she refused to answer questions after hours of interrogation aimed at determining her motives for the killing.
Sediqi said the assailant shot only once, striking the American in the side of the chest. He died either on the way or just upon arrival at a hospital, the spokesman added, describing her act as a "huge crime."
A NATO command spokesman, US Air Force Lt. Col. Lester T. Carroll, said the slain adviser was a contractor whose identity wasn't immediately released. "We can confirm that a civilian police adviser was shot and killed this morning by a suspected member of the Afghan uniformed police," Carroll said.
The attack occurred outside the police headquarters in a walled, highly secure compound which also houses the governor's office, courts and a prison. Kabul Deputy Police Chief Mohammad Daoud Amin said an investigation was under way.
Nargas, a mother of four, had worked with a human rights department of the police for two years and had earlier been a refugee in Pakistan and Iran, Amin said.
She could enter the compound armed because as a police officer she was licensed to carry a pistol, the police official said. Amin did not know whether the killer and victim were acquainted.
"Her background is very clean. We don't see that she had any connection with armed insurgent groups," Sediqi said. He added that she aroused no suspicion because she frequently went back and forth on business between the compound and the Interior Ministry where she worked.
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