February 18, 2002	Monday	Zilhaj 5, 1422

KABUL, Feb 17: Afghanistan’s interim leader Hamid Karzai said on Sunday he would ask the multinational force in Kabul to take a stronger role if security does not improve in the capital, even as the international troops came under attack for the first time.

Karzai, who has vowed to track down the “assassins” of one of his ministers on Thursday at Kabul’s airport, said he may ask the international community for more participation in the force patrolling the war-torn city.

“If the security situation in Afghanistan does not improve further, we will make sure the international security forces are asked together with the Afghan forces to take a stronger role,” Karzai said.

“I will ask for every measure to bring security to the Afghan people. I will use international forces, Afghan forces, to make life good for these people,” he vowed.

“And if I’m told ‘no, we cannot do’, then I will let the world know that ‘look, the international community is not helping,’” Karzai said.

The Afghan leader has accused senior security officials of the killing of Aviation and Tourism Minister Abdul Rahman as part of a “personal vendetta.”

The incident has taken on a political dimension as most of those accused are members of former president Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat-i-Islami party.

But Karzai said his accusations were based on “clear-cut” witness accounts and that the killing “didn’t have any political motives behind it”.

“They (government members) are fully, fully united. Every member of the cabinet exactly acted as an Afghan minister and not as a party minister,” he said.

The interim government has arrested an unspecified number of officials over Rahman’s killing and has said three officials, two of them generals, escaped to Saudi Arabia disguised as pilgrims to Mecca.

“The three that were in Saudi Arabia are the senior people and they will be brought here,” he said.

Saudi Interior Minister Nayef bin Abdel Aziz said on Saturday that the kingdom had not received any official demand to extradite the three Afghans.

Karzai’s account of the killing contradicted earlier versions of events by officials and witnesses, who said Rahman was lynched by a mob of pilgrims, furious the minister was boarding a flight to New Delhi while they were waiting for planes delayed by two days.

Karzai vowed the pilgrims would make it to Makkah and said his “whole government has stopped” in the past two days to arrange the flights.

But snow continued to impede air traffic from Kabul, with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer cancelling a trip on Sunday. He had been due to take Karzai with him for a visit to Berlin.

Karzai’s call for a potential stronger role for the International Security Assist-ance Force (ISAF) came one day after the multinational troops came under fire for the first time. The soldiers of the British 2nd Parachute Battalion returned the fire of gunmen who fled in a car, said ISAF’s chief of staff Colonel Richard Barrons.

A car was later discovered riddled with bullets and i