Bodies of 5 Afghan police officers recovered

The bodies of five more of the Afghan police officers captured last week by the Taliban in a rural district have been recovered, and Afghan officials said Sunday that the men were brutally slain.

The grisly discovery brought to nine the number of confirmed deaths among a group of 16 officers who disappeared when the Taliban overran the Khogyani district of Ghazni province in the early hours of Nov. 1.

A Taliban spokesman asserted at the time that the men had willingly joined the insurgency — a particularly sensitive subject in advance of this month’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit.

A central topic at the NATO gathering, in Lisbon, will be the ability of Afghan security forces to eventually assume responsibility for safeguarding the nation. Discussions are expected to encompass not only the Afghan police and army’s trainability, but also touch on their loyalties as well.

Afghan officials said the killings appeared to disprove the claim that the men defected to the Taliban, but suggested that someone with knowledge of how the police force operated might have colluded with the insurgents.

“It is still under investigation whether someone was involved in a conspiracy that led to the capture of our policemen,” Interior Ministry spokesman Zemari Bashary told reporters in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

He refused to specify how the captives had died, other than to say the killings were carried out in a “brutal and un-Islamic fashion,” a phrase sometimes employed by officials to describe beheadings. The fate of the seven remaining men is unknown, he said.

Security has rapidly deteriorated in recent months in Ghazni, south of Kabul, and the abduction of what was virtually an entire district police force illustrated the ease with which insurgents can terrorize remote towns and villages.

The incident also pointed up the growing reach of the Taliban beyond the areas considered the movement’s traditional strongholds: the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, and a cluster of provinces in Afghanistan’s east, closest to Pakistan’s largely ungoverned tribal areas.

Aware of the vulnerability of rural communities, Afghan officials, with Western backing, have been moving ahead with the creation of a new local police force. The effort has been focused on districts where local governance is considered weak. Bashary said deployment was underway in eight provinces so far, and disclosed districts in nine other provinces to be targeted soon.

The village police program has drawn some criticism from Afghans who fear it amounts to creating and arming local militias, which have wreaked havoc here in the past. Proponents say regular police and army units are too thinly spread to provide adequate protection in many areas.

The NATO force on Sunday reported the deaths of two more service members, both in the east of the country, but did not disclose their nationalities.

Officials in Helmand province also said five Afghan civilians, including one woman, were killed when their minibus hit a roadside bomb outside the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah. Insurgents use buried bombs as their principal weapon against Western troops, but most of the victims are civilians.

laura.king@latimes.com