| | Afghan corruption official denies report he was fired AFP
08/31/2010
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"The New York Times has invented that story"
KABUL – A leading Afghan prosecutor denied Monday that he was fired by the president for refusing to block corruption investigations at the highest levels of government, as reported by a US newspaper.
Former deputy attorney general Fazael Ahmad Faqiryar said he had left his post because at 72 years old "it was my time to retire".
"The New York Times has invented that story about me, I strongly dismiss (the) report," Faqiryar told AFP.
"It was not a matter of my resignation, be it forced or voluntary. I was never forced into retirement at all. The New York Times is lying," he said.
The New York Times reported Saturday that Faqiryar told the paper in an interview that investigations of more than two dozen senior Afghan officials were being held up or blocked outright by President Hamid Karzai, Attorney General Mohammed Ishaq Aloko and others.
The account was largely corroborated in interviews with five Western officials familiar with the cases, the report said.
These officials said Karzai and others in his government had repeatedly thwarted prosecutions against senior Afghan government figures, The Times said.
One US official, speaking to the paper on condition of anonymity, said that Afghan prosecutors had prepared several cases against officials suspected of corruption, but that Karzai was "stalling and stalling and stalling", it said.
"We propose investigations, detentions and prosecutions of high government officials, but we cannot resist him," Faqiryar was quoted as saying of Karzai.
"He won't sign anything. We have great, honest and professional prosecutors here, but we need support."
Speaking Monday, Faqiryar said: "I don't have the moral courage to directly accuse or criticise the president, I don't have the authority to directly contact the president.
"There is no truth to what The New York Times said in its report quoting me. Can anyone in the world believe that a prosecutor would say those bad things about his president?"
Graft is a major issue in Afghanistan, which is rated by international monitor Transparency International as second only to lawless Somalia on its scale of the world's most corrupt countries.
Britain's Guardian newspaper Monday also reported Faqiryar saying he was forced into retirement after aggressively promoting corruption investigations against top officials, including a trusted Karzai aide.
In an interview at his Kabul home, Faqiryar told the newspaper that attorney general Aloko "was always asking us to delay that case on that governor or that minister.
"Or he would say we can't send that high-profile case to court," the newspaper quoted him as saying.
Most notable was an investigation into Mohammed Zia Salehi, head of Afghanistan's National Security Council, who was arrested last month in connection with a major fraud inquiry he is alleged to have helped derail.
Salehi was soon released after telephoning Karzai for help, officials and diplomats have said.
The Salehi affair has become a huge scandal, in which Karzai is seen protecting those closest to him at the expense of two foreign-funded bodies that had been held up as evidence he was dealing with the corruption at the heart of his government.
Karzai ordered a review of the two anti-corruption bodies, the Major Crimes Task Force and the Sensitive Investigative Unit, which have been operating for 18 months with the help of foreign advisers and with mostly US funding.
US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said the United States was "in touch with the Afghan government" about the departure of the deputy attorney general, adding he had been doing "vitally important" work in fighting corruption.
Senator John Kerry, after meeting Karzai earlier this month, said the Afghan government must show progress on eradicating corruption or risk losing the support of the United States.
Approval of nearly four billion dollars in US aid to Afghanistan is being blocked amid fears that US money is being siphoned off by Afghan officials.
The United States has almost 93,000 troops in the country, who along with 48,000 NATO soldiers are battling a Taliban-led insurgency on Karzai's behalf.
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