ASSASSINATION LINKED TO OPIUM TRADE

Plan To End Poppy Crop

KABUL - As Afghans around the country mourned the killing of a
vice-president, Afghan officials said yesterday they were investigating the
possibility he had been killed by drug lords who had been double-crossed
during a Western-backed campaign to destroy the country's poppy crop.

Abdul Haji Qadir, who was shot and killed on Saturday, had been overseeing
the Western-financed campaign, begun in April, to root out the poppy crop
in the country. Afghan officials have been paying poppy farmers about
US$500 per acre to destroy their plants.

A senior Afghan official said yesterday Mr. Qadir had recently complained
the money was not being distributed to the farmers even though they were
bowing to his demand to uproot their poppies. The Afghan official said Mr.
Qadir's efforts, coupled with the failure to pay certain farmers, may have
enraged powerful members of the country's opium trade. Those drug lords,
the Afghan official said, may have decided to take revenge.

"In some instances, there were problems with the flow of the money; there
were people who didn't get any," the Afghan official said. "That was a
concern to Mr. Qadir. That is why it is now a concern to us."

Mr. Qadir, a wealthy businessman from Jalalabad, had long been suspected of
enriching himself through involvement in the opium trade. Some Afghans
speculated Mr. Qadir may have made enemies by favouring one drug lord over
another.

In the weeks before his death, Mr. Qadir had complained to others in Kabul
about his predicament and he acknowledged his problems in an interview
after he was sworn in as one of the country's five vice-presidents late
last month. Mr. Qadir said then an Afghan organization designated to dole
out the Western money to poppy farmers had kept it instead. But at the
time, Mr. Qadir indicated in the interview the problem had been resolved.

The Afghan organization "stole the money," Mr. Qadir said during the
interview. "They stopped distributing the money, but now they will
distribute it."

Mr. Qadir's troubles came to light a day after a pair of gunmen shot and
killed him in his car as he left his office in downtown Kabul. The killers
escaped and the police detained 10 government guards for failing to prevent
the attack or to chase his assailants.

Mr. Qadir's death could deal a heavy blow to the Western-backed government
of Hamid Karzai, the newly elected President, though it may be less
damaging if it turns out it was tied to Mr. Qadir's individual problems.

George W. Bush, the U.S. President, suggested the killing could have been
related to the effort to stem the country's drug trade. On Saturday, Mr.
Bush said: "The Afghan government believes they can handle the
investigation. There's all kinds of scenarios as to who killed him. It
could be drug lords, it could be long-time rivals. All we know is a good
man is dead and we mourn his loss."

Afghan officials said they were examining a number of possible motives for
Mr. Qadir's killing, including that he might have been the target of
fighters or his political rivals.

Mr. Karzai was relying on Mr. Qadir, an ethnic Pashtun, to coax members of
that ethnic group, the country's largest, into supporting the government.
While Mr. Karzai is himself an ethnic Pashtun, the government he heads is
dominated by ethnic Tajiks, who led the resistance against the Taliban.

Mr. Qadir's long involvement in the cutthroat world of Afghan politics
ensured he had many enemies. He fought against the Taliban, but he belonged
to a political party that once gave shelter to Osama bin Laden. As he
emerged as the governor of Nangarhar province after the rout of the
Taliban, he angered many of his rivals. Nangarhar is one of the key links
in the south Asian drug trade.

Any and all of Mr. Qadir's faults seemed forgotten yesterday, as Afghans
poured into the streets of Kabul and Jalalabad, his home, to bid him
farewell. The funeral began in the morning, when his flag-draped coffin was
carried atop an artillery piece through the streets of Kabul, accompanied
by a line of soldiers and a military band. The troops, dressed in wrinkled
Soviet-era uniforms and carrying ancient bolt-action rifles, goose-stepped
for a time and then gave up, and the music rose and fell away.

The people of Kabul saw many horrors in the 22 years of war that only
recently subsided and Mr. Qadir's killing, though noted with grief, spurred
little discernible panic. Some Kabul residents said violent deaths such as
Mr. Qadir's were to be expected as the country limps and lurches its away
toward normalcy.

"Murders like this are common in countries like Afghanistan," said
Hayatullah, a 58-year-old Kabul resident. "But after two decades of war, we
have a much better situation."