A tragic incident in which German soldiers shot dead three
Afghan civilian occupants of a car prompted calls in Germany Saturday to pull
German troops out of Afghanistan.
German prosecutors have begun an inquiry to establish whether the soldiers who
opened fire Thursday evening were culpable in any way. The prosecutors from
near Berlin said they had sent a request to the Justice Ministry in Kabul that
it assist the investigation.
Defence officials said German troops had been nervous at the time after one of
them had been killed by a suicide bomber this week.
A German news website, Spiegel Online, quoted German officers saying a warning
had been circulated that an explosive-packed vehicle would be used to attack
German troops Thursday evening.
The German armed forces said a woman and two children were killed and two
children injured when their car accelerated away from a checkpoint at Karuti
near Kunduz. The checkpoint was manned by Afghan police and several of their
German military-police trainers.
Germans in a Dingo armoured car opened fire at the moving car from a distance
of about 100 metres.
A senior Green who is hostile to the military presence, Hans- Christian
Stroebele, and the Left Party, which voted against the deployment in the first
place, said in Berlin the troops should come home.
The Left caucus leader, Gregor Gysi, said in a newspaper interview he feared
Germany would become "bogged down in a dirty war that does not combat
terrorism but creates a new inclination to violence."
Bernhard Gertz, who heads the armed forces association, a group that functions
as a quasi trade union for German soldiers, said in an interview with the
Sunday newspaper BZ am Sonntag that Germany should increase its police training
force 10-fold from 200 to 2,000.
But the German Police Union GdP disagreed, with a spokesman saying it saw no
point in sending any German police to Afghanistan at all, dpa reported.