Taliban militants opened fire today on an Afghan government delegation visiting one of the two villages in southern Afghanistan where a US soldier is suspected of killing 16 civilians.
The gun attack killed an Afghan soldier who was providing security for the delegation, said the police chief for Kandahar province where the visit took place. Another Afghan soldier and a military prosecutor were injured in the attack, he said.
The attack in Balandi village came as the Taliban vowed to kill and behead those responsible for killing 16 Afghan civilians on Sunday. President Barack Obama said the massacre increases his determination to get US troops out of Afghanistan.
The delegation, which included two of president Hamid Karzai's brothers and other senior officials, was holding a memorial service in a mosque for victims when the shooting started.
One of the president’s brothers, Qayum Karzai, said the attack did not seem serious to him. "We were giving them our condolences, then we heard two very, very light shots," he said. "Then we assumed that it was the national army that started to fire in the air."
He said the members of the delegation, which also included Kandahar governor Tooryalai Wesa and minister of border and tribal affairs Asadullah Khalid, were safe and headed back to Kandahar city.
The United States is holding in custody an Army staff sergeant, who is suspected of carrying out the killings before dawn on Sunday in two villages close to his base in Panjwai district, considered the birthplace of the Taliban.
Villagers have described him stalking from house to house in the middle of the night, opening fire on sleeping families and then burning some of the bodies of the dead. Nine of the 16 killed were children, and three were women, according to Mr Karzai.
Sunday's shootings triggered calls from Afghans for an immediate US exit, but Mr Obama said there should not be a "rush to the exits" for US forces who have been fighting in Afghanistan since 2001 and that the drawdown must be carried out in a responsible way.
Defence secretary Leon Panetta said the death penalty could be sought in the US military justice system against the soldier, whose name has not been disclosed.
Referring to the killings, Mr Obama said in an interview: "It makes me more determined to make sure we're getting our troops home.
"It's time. It's been a decade, and, frankly, now that we've gotten [Osama] bin Laden, now that we've weakened al-Qaeda, we're in a stronger position to transition than we would have been two or three years ago," he added, referring to the al-Qaeda leader killed by US forces last year in Pakistan.
Mr Obama was pressed in another interview on whether there were parallels between the killing of 16 Afghan villagers and the notorious 1968 My Lai massacre of the Vietnam War.
"It's not comparable," the president responded. "It appeared you had a lone gunman who acted on his own. In no way is this representative of the enormous sacrifices that our men and women have made in Afghanistan."
The staff sergeant accused in the incident was treated for traumatic brain injury suffered in a vehicle rollover in 2010 during a previous deployment in Iraq, a US official said. However, the official said it was premature to state whether there was any link between the brain injury and Sunday's shootings.
Mr Panetta portrayed the shooting as an isolated event that would not alter plans for a gradual, orderly withdrawal of US forces by the end of 2014.
"War is hell. These kinds of events and incidents are going to take place, they've taken place in any war. They're terrible events. And this is not the first of those events, and it probably won't be the last," he told reporters on a flight to Kyrgyzstan. "But we cannot allow these events to undermine our strategy or the mission that we're involved in."
Reuters