Nov 4, 2009, 12:50 GMT
Kabul/London - Training up the Afghan police and army remains an 'essential element' of coalition strategy in the country - despite the shooting dead of five British soldiers by an Afghan trainee policeman, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Wednesday.
Poppy Crosses with messages of remembrance lie in Westminster Abbey gardens ahead of Remembrance Sunday in London, Britain, 04 November 2009. Britons honour their war dead during this week ahead of Remembrance Sunday 08 November. Five British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan 04 November. EPA/ANDY RAIN
Brown told parliament in London that the Taliban had claimed responsibility for the attack at a checkpoint in Helmand province Tuesday. The prime minister described the loss of the men as a 'terrible and tragic' incident and vowed to step up security to halt the suspected infiltration of Afghan security forces.
However, the key coalition strategy of 'training and mentoring' Afghan police and army recruits would not be abandoned, as it was 'what the Taliban fear most,' said Brown.
The deaths of three British soldiers and two military policemen have come as a blow to the British government as it underlined the dangers of recruiting Afghans who might be sympathetic to the Taliban cause, analysts said.
Conservative leader David Cameron called on the government to ensure that the police was free from infiltration by the 'drugs trade, criminals or the Taliban.'
But Armed Forces Minister Bill Rammell told parliament that recruits to the Afghan army and police were subject to thorough vetting.
Meanwhile, Peter Galbraith, the former deputy head of the United Nations (UN) mission in Afghanistan told the BBC that security had been neglected in the 'rushed bid' to train Afghan officers in the run-up to recent presidential election in Afghanistan.
'The process of police training and recruiting has been very rushed. So it is not totally surprising that people were recruited who may have had Taliban sympathies or were infiltrated into the police by the Taliban,' Galbraith said in a BBC interview.
Four of the men died immediately while the fifth succumbed to his injuries later, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement. It said six other soldiers were injured in Tuesday's attack.
'It is our understanding that one individual Afghan National Policeman, possibly in conjunction with another, went rogue,' a British military policeman in Helmand said, according to the Press Association.
Daoud Ahmadi, spokesman for Helmand's governor, said the soldiers were killed in Shina Klay village in the restive district of Nad Ali.
But a senior police official in the province said a man in police uniform shot the soldiers and then escaped from the area.
'We don't know if the attacker was a member of a Taliban group or there was some kind of personal motivation behind his act,' said the police official, who declined to be named.
He said an Afghan police commander for the Gulbuddin checkpoint, where the incident took place, and another policeman were injured in the shooting.
The ISAF and the Afghan Ministry of Interior jointly began a investigation into the incident, the alliance said.
'We will not let this event deter our resolve to build a partnership with the Afghan National Security Forces to provide for Afghanistan's future,' US General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of NATO and US forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement.
'Every casualty suffered in our country comes with profound regret,' Afghan Interior Minister Haneef Atmar said in the same statement, adding, 'This appears to be an isolated incident.'
News reports quoted a spokesman from Britain's Task Force Helmand as saying that the soldiers were at a checkpoint at the time of the incident and were fired upon by an Afghan policeman.
The Britons were training Afghan police in what was described as a 'secure compound' when the incident took place.
The deaths bring to 229 the total number of British troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001.
With nearly 460 foreign soldiers killed, 2009 has become the deadliest year for more than 100,000 international troops deployed in Afghanistan from 42 nations since the ouster of the Taliban regime eight years ago.
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