Kabul: A NATO spokesman said Tuesday it was
too early to conclude that the Taliban were involved in the killing of four French troops by an Afghan soldier last week.
"As we've seen with incidents of this type -- we have
found through investigations there are many reasons for these
incidents," NATO's US-led International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) said on its Twitter feed.
"It is too early to make claims of Taliban involvement in
such incidents at this time."
The attack on the soldiers, who were unarmed, came on
Friday at a base in eastern Afghanistan and left 15 other
French troops wounded, eight of them seriously.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy reacted angrily,
threatening to pull his forces out of Afghanistan ahead of the
2014 deadline for all US-led coalition combat troops and
dispatched Defence Minister Gerard Longuet to Kabul.
Longuet said in Kabul that he was told the killer was a
Taliban infiltrator in the ranks of the Afghan army.
But well-placed security sources have told said that the
man arrested for the shooting has confessed to interrogators
that he did it because of a recent video showing US Marines
urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters.
PTI
First Published: Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 14:40