Afghan official says newly revealed crime record of man chosen to govern Marjah will be probed

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Afghan: Marjah chief’s crime record will be probed

KABUL — Afghan government officials are not rushing to oust the man they chose to bring fresh and credible governance to a town just seized from the Taliban, but his newly disclosed violent criminal record in Germany will be investigated further, officials said Saturday.

Court records and news reports in Germany show that Abdul Zahir, who has been appointed as civilian chief in Marjah, served part of a more than four-year prison sentence for stabbing his son in 1998. An American official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, also confirmed Zahir has a criminal record in Germany.

Zahir denies he committed any crime.

“What we’re going to do is investigate more and see what exactly happened and then we will decide,” said Barna Karami, deputy of the Afghanistan Independent Directorate of Local Government, which works to boost the effectiveness of local governments.

“For any claims, there are two sides. So you have to carefully evaluate all those claims and investigate it, and once you come to a good judgment then you make a decision.”

Zahir’s criminal record is at issue because he’s tasked with convincing residents of Marjah in Helmand province that the Afghan central government can provide for them better than the Taliban. The insurgents were routed during a three-week offensive by thousands of U.S., NATO and Afghan troops, and Zahir was appointed the face of a new local government — a key test of NATO’s counterinsurgency strategy since President Barack Obama dispatched 30,000 reinforcements to the war.

Adm. Gregory Smith, director of communications for NATO, said the international alliance strongly supported Helmand Gov. Gulab Mangal, who picked Zahir for the job. “Zahir, from our reporting, is doing good work down there,” Smith said Saturday, adding that NATO is not pushing Afghan officials to find someone else for the job.

Zahir said he lived in Germany for 15 years before returning to Afghanistan in 2000. He said he worked in Germany at a hotel and a laundry service. It was during this time that he was sentenced for attempted manslaughter.

“I was not a killer. I was not a smuggler. … I didn’t commit any crime,” Zahir told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Friday evening. He said allegations of a criminal record were “all a lie” and accused his adversaries in Afghanistan of trying to tarnish his reputation.

Residents of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, say Zahir has lived there with his family for the past four years. They say he’s been involved in local government issues. Zahir, a leading member of the Alizai tribe, said he took the job as civilian chief in Marjah because he loved his country. “My country needed me,” he said. “My relatives, my tribe were here.”

“This news is coming from those people who are against me,” he said. “They are against my relations with the foreigners. They want to sabotage me. They don’t want such a person to serve the people, who has good relations with Americans, British, and foreigners.”

Mangal, the governor of Helmand, was traveling on Saturday and could not be reached for comment. In an interview last week, he said he was not aware of anything illegal in Zahir’s background.

“He is not being appointed forever, but he will be here for some time,” he said.

Mangal said Interpol was asked to check whether Zahir had any outstanding warrants or was being sought. He said Interpol said he was not on any watch list or wanted for any crime.

If Zahir isn’t up to the task, Mangal said, “We will dismiss him. If he doesn’t have the ability, if he doesn’t bring law and order and security, then we will dismiss him.”

Annette von Schmiedeberg, a spokeswoman for the Offenbach branch of the prosecutor’s office in Darmstadt in central Germany, said Friday that an Afghan citizen with the name Abdul Z. was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison for attempted manslaughter by the county court in Darmstadt on Nov. 2, 1998. Von Schmiedeberg said that in accordance with German privacy laws she could not give the full name or details about the crime.

A person familiar with Zahir and the 1998 court sentencing in Germany identified him Friday for the AP after viewing a pair of photographs of him taken last month. He asked that his name not be published because he feared for his life.

The newspaper Darmstaedter Echo provided three archived articles to the AP that confirmed a court hearing and sentencing of an Afghan citizen at the county court in Darmstadt on the same date, Nov. 2, 1998.

In an article from Nov. 3, 1998, it said the defendant from Afghanistan was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison because “he attempted to stab his 18-year-old son to death with a kitchen knife in the kitchen of his stepdaughter in Nieder-Roden on Dec. 15, 1997, around 4:45 p.m.” Nieder-Roden is part of the small town of Rodgau in the central German state of Hesse.

The newspaper said the defendant, who was 47 years old at the time of the sentencing, confessed to the allegations.

He was described as a father of 13 children and husband of two wives.

“The court’s chamber assesses that the attack, in which the young man received life-threatening injuries to his liver, was a deliberate attempt of manslaughter and it is therefore sentencing the accused to four years and nine months,” the Darmstaedter Echo said.

According to the newspaper’s account, the accused said he had been persecuted by the Taliban in Afghanistan and moved with his family to Rodgau in 1989. The court said the man could not cope with the fact that three of his stepchildren, among them two twin sons, turned away from him and moved into their own apartment in 1996, it reported.

In August 1997, he lured them to Afghanistan saying he wanted them to attend a wedding there, the newspaper said. But once they arrived in Afghanistan, he took away their passports and plane tickets and abandoned them, it said.

In early December, the sons returned to Germany with financial help from somebody else, the newspaper said.

Back in Rodgau, the convicted man told other Afghans that his children had been kidnapped by an “archenemy in Afghanistan,” the newspaper said. However, when one of his wives told him on Dec. 15 that his sons had returned to Germany, he beat her, it said.

One of his sons consequently confronted him about the beating, and he reacted by stabbing his son with an eight-inch (21-centimeter) kitchen knife, it said.

After the stabbing, the accused fled via the Netherlands and the Czech Republic to the German-Polish border where he was arrested on Jan. 7, 1998, near the German town of Goerlitz, it said.

In an earlier article about the ongoing court trial in Darmstadt, the Darmstaedter Echo reported on Oct. 15, 1998, that the accused was a driver for the defense minister in his homeland and also worked as a salesman.

Grieshaber reported from Berlin. Associated Press writers Kathy Gannon and Amir Shah in Kabul contributed to this report.