Robertson: 36 shots fired

Robertson

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Gunmen waiting outside the gates of a government ministry Saturday afternoon opened fire on a vehicle carrying one of Afghanistan's three vice presidents, killing him and his driver.

CNN Correspondent Nic Robertson filed this report from Kabul.

ROBERTSON: Haji Abdul Qadir was gunned down as he was going into his offices about three hours ago in Kabul. He was driving into those offices with his driver when gunmen approached the vehicle. They opened fire. We're told 36 shots were fired into the windscreen and into the side of the vehicle as well. Both he and the driver were killed.

He's also the minister of reconstruction. But more importantly, he is a Pashtun leader here. He was very powerful and very well respected in the east of Afghanistan where he was a governor of the Nangarhar province around Jalalabad in the east of Afghanistan before the Taliban came here.

And he was, after the Taliban left, made again governor of that province. But because of feelings in Afghanistan that the Northern Alliance, the Tajik-dominated group that helped sweep the Taliban from power, had so much power in Kabul, he was asked to come to Kabul to join the president, Hamid Karzai, also a Pashtun.

This will be seen by many Pashtuns as a blow for their power position within the power structure, within the administration in Afghanistan, and it will be a blow for the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai.

Haji Qadir was a very powerful ally and had a very strong following.

He was provided with a security detail from his predecessor, who previously had the position of minister of reconstruction, that numbered, we understand, approximately 10 guards, who, we've been told at this time, have been placed under arrest. It's not clear if they're implicated in this crime at this time, but they have, we are told, been put under arrest.

In the city of Kabul itself, security has generally been widely viewed to be guaranteed and assured by the ISAPF, the International Security and Protection Force that's inside Afghanistan, numbering approximately 4,000 soldiers. At any time, small groups of those can be seen patrolling the capital of Kabul.

However, it does have to be said they can't be everywhere all the time. Weapons, as has been blatantly clear for a long time in Afghanistan, are in the hands of many, many people here. There have, of course, been efforts over the last six or seven months to get the guns off the streets and out of the capital, Kabul.

And on the face of it, that appears to have happened. People don't blatantly carry them in the streets as they used to. However, there has been no mass handing in of weapons. Weapons are pretty much freely available here.

So it's likely going to be quite a tough job to find out who the perpetrators of this crime were. The government's calling them terrorists. But with so many weapons in the country, the possibilities are quite wide.

CNN: What is the latest on the accidental U.S. attack on civilian Afghans earlier this week?

ROBERTSON: Well, the latest on that is, there is still not really an agreement about the official Afghan death toll figures of some 40 or so and 120 or so injured. That does not quite line up with what the coalition investigators found when they were investigating that incident.

They couldn't tally the number of dead, and they couldn't tally the number of injured. However, at a briefing today given by the head of the coalition forces, Gen. Dan McNeill, and by Afghanistan's foreign minister, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, both leaders tried to put a positive face on what had happened.

Dr. Abdullah saying that it was important for coalition forces to avoid civilian casualties, but he also said that the people of Afghanistan understood the need for coalition forces to be here to try and get rid of the Taliban and al Qaeda.

And he said that was something that he felt most Afghans were very supportive of coalition forces. For his part, Gen. McNeill said that it was never an intention to target civilians, that they would be everything they can, coalition forces do everything they can to avoid civilian casualties.

But further than that, he said that the possibility of this sort of thing happening again would be minimalized by steps that they would take.