AFGHAN KILLING MAY BE LINKED TO DRUG TRADE

KABUL, Afghanistan, July 7 - As Afghans around the country mourned the
killing of a vice president, Afghan officials said today that they were
investigating the possibility that he had been killed by drug lords who had
been double-crossed during a Western-backed campaign to destroy the
country's poppy crop.

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

A senior Afghan official said today that Mr. Qadir had recently complained
that 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
that Mr. Qadir's efforts, coupled with the failure to pay certain farmers,
may have enraged powerful members of the country's opium mafia. 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 that Mr. Qadir may have made enemies by favoring one drug lord
over another.

In an interview after he was sworn in as one of the country's five vice
presidents late last month, Mr. Qadir said that an Afghan organization
designated to pay poppy farmers had kept it instead. But at the time, Mr.
Qadir indicated that 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 theday after a pair of gunmen shot and
killed him in his car as he left his office here. The killers escaped, and
the police detained 10 government guards for failing to prevent the attack
or chase his assailants.

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

President Bush suggested that the killing could have been related to the
effort to stem the country's drug trade. In remarks he made Saturday, he
said: "There's all kinds of scenarios as to who killed him. It could be
drug lords, it could be longtime 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 Qaeda
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 that 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.

Mr. Qadir's faults seemed forgotten today, 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. The prevailing feeling here, among the
residents as well as the city's protectors, was that Mr. Qadir's death was
probably more related to Mr. Qadir himself than to a conspiracy hatched by
the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

Col. Samet Oz, a spokesman for the international security force charged
with keeping order here, said the attack on Mr. Qadir was most likely an
isolated one. He did not elaborate, but predicted that the violence was
over for now.

"I believe this attack will not be followed by others," he said.