126 Afghan villagers massacred—claim

Press, 21 October 1983, Page 6

126 Afghan villagers massacred—claim

NZPA Islamabad Soviet troops executed 126 Afghan villagers, bayoneting women and children, in a recent military operation outside Kandahar City in south-eastern Afghanistan, survivors of the alleged massacre asserted yesterday.

The accounts, the most gruesome to emerge from Afghanistan since war flared five years ago, could not be independently confirmed.

However, the source of the report, a former Afghan diplomat, Habibullaah Karzai, has proved accurate in past dispatches from the area where Afghanistan’s second largest city is located.

Mr Karzai, who represented the Kabul Govern-

ment at the United Nations in 1972, based his report on accounts from Afghan refugees reaching the southwestern Pakistan city of Quetta, where he lives.

According to the version he obtained, the atrocities took place last week at the villages of Moshkizai and Kolchabad in a reprisal against civilians for a guerrilla attack the day before on a troop convoy in which seven tanks were set. on fire.

“I was told that the troops returned on foot the next day. They rounded up the people, gunning down the men and bayoneting the women and children. Then they levelled the houses. In one case 18 members of one family were killed,” he said. Other villages in the area were later subjected to

heavy aerial bombing, he said.

The death toll would have been higher if many villagers had not managed to flee before troops encircled the area, he added.

Mr Karzai said that local resistance bands began hit-and-run attacks on convoys earlier in the week when troops began installing military outposts around the city, which is believed to have a population of about 400,000.

On Wednesday, three tank columns were sighted encircling the city. Guerrillas attacked and destroyed 11 tanks and armoured personnel carriers, he said. The next day another column moved in, only to be attacked again. That, he said, appeared to trigger the reprisals,