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Posted on 01/16/2003 2:37:11 PM PST by knighthawk
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — An Afghan suspected of wounding two U.S. servicemen in a Kabul grenade attack last month admitted receiving terror training at a camp inside Afghanistan, the country's interior minister said Thursday.
However, Interior Minister Taj Mohammed Wardak said the suspect did not identify his alleged instructors or say whether they were Afghan or foreign. The training occurred late last year, the suspect allegedly said.
But the admission by suspect Amir Mohammad, believed to be in his teens, seems to indicate that fugitive Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists continue operating training camps despite efforts by U.S.-led coalition forces and their Afghan allies to hunt them down and eliminate them.
The suspect's claim also supports last month's United Nations report saying small, often mobile training camps operate in Afghanistan's mountainous border regions.
Mohammed is accused of throwing a grenade into a jeep carrying two U.S. Special Forces soldiers driving through the capital city Dec. 17.
One soldier suffered an eye injury and the other a leg injury, a U.S. military spokeswoman said at the time. The injuries were not life-threatening.
The soldiers' Afghan interpreter also was injured.
Mohammed, who is from Khost in eastern Afghanistan, told Wardak that he and about a dozen other men trained for a week at a base six miles from the southern Afghan border with Pakistan.
About a dozen teachers taught the students how to use guns and bombs in attack, Wardak said he was told.
``They taught him that if you are a good Muslim and if you love your home and your country, you should bomb the Americans,'' Wardak told The Associated Press.
After the training ended, the graduates visited the southern Afghanistan graves of Taliban and al-Qaida members killed in a 2001 battle with U.S. forces as the hardline Islamic regime was collapsing, Wardak said. They prayed for success in attacks on Americans.
Five students then traveled to Kabul, with Mohammad saying he went to the central market looking for Americans to target.
Wardak said the suspect was being detained by Afghan authorities but American officers have taken him away for brief periods of questioning.
Last month's grenade attack was the first against U.S. forces in Kabul, which is patrolled by a 4,800-strong international security force comprising troops from Turkey and several European nations.
About 8,000 American servicemen are in Afghanistan hunting for terror suspects linked to the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
Fifteen U.S. servicemen have been killed in combat or hostile situations in Afghanistan since the anti-terror campaign began in autumn 2001.
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