INVESTIGATORS examining the mysterious killing of two foreign DHL executives by one of their own guards in Kabul on Saturday are considering a possible link to heroin smugglers.
Jason Bresler, the South African country director of DHL, the global delivery service, and his UK deputy David Giles, were killed as their car arrived at their office in central Kabul. Security officials say the killings may be linked to traffickers angry at Mr Bresler's efforts to prevent DHL being used as a conduit for a portion of Afghanistan's heroin output.
Mr Bresler had personally overseen the disposal of nearly 3kg of heroin that had been sewn into a quilt and put in parcel.
He had also ordered a new set of sniffer dogs be sent to Afghanistan after the previous pack had failed to detect drugs in parcels.
In another attempt to evade DHL's security procedures, traffickers had concealed heroin inside cricket pads that they hoped to ship out of the country.
Afghanistan's narco-traffickers are part of a €2.4 billion a year business and are some of the most dangerous people in the country.
The interior ministry confirmed that one of the guards employed by Saladin, a local security company, had shot the men before shooting himself, with "one bullet under his chin", according to the ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary. "No one knows if this person was recruited [to carry out the killing] or there was infiltration of the enemy," Mr Bashary said. The guard had been recruited only a month previously. - (Financial Times service)