Afghan cop kills 2 U.S. troops

KABUL, Afghanistan – A police officer opened fire on U.S. and Afghan forces at a police headquarters in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, sparking a firefight that killed two U.S. troops and two other Afghan policemen. The attacker was also killed in the shootout, officials said.

In a second incident, outside Kabul, U.S. troops fired on a truck approaching their military convoy, killing two Afghan men inside.

The shooting in the eastern Wardak province was the latest in a series of insider attacks against coalition and Afghan forces that have threatened to undermine their alliance at a time when cooperation would aid the planned handover of security responsibility to local forces next year.

The attack also comes a day after the expiration of the Afghan president’s deadline for U.S. special operations forces to withdraw from the province.

U.S. officials have said that they are working with Afghan counterparts to answer President Hamid Karzai’s concerns and maintain security in Wardak. Most U.S. troops in Wardak are special operations forces.

In Monday’s attack, an Afghan police officer stood up in the back of a police pickup truck, grabbed a machine gun and started firing at a U.S. special operations forces-led team and Afghan policemen in the police compound in Jalrez district, said the province’s deputy police chief, Abdul Razaq Koraishi. Two U.S. special operations soldiers and two Afghan policemen were killed and four others were wounded in the gunfight before the assailant was gunned down, Koraishi said.

It is unclear whether the assailant was targeting the Afghan policemen along with the U.S. special operations forces and whether they were killed by the assailant’s bullets or during the crossfire.

The U.S. military said in a statement that two American service members were killed in the shooting. A U.S. defense official in Washington and a coalition official in Afghanistan said 10 Americans – both special operators and regular soldiers who worked in a combined team – and at least 12 Afghans were wounded in the attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the attack.

U.S. forces were holding five police officers for questioning, Koraishi said.

Karzai ordered U.S. special operations forces to leave Wardak province, just outside the Afghan capital, because of allegations that Afghans working with the U.S. commandos were involved in abusive behavior.

Karzai gave them two weeks to leave, and the deadline expired Sunday.