U.S. Army Reopens Criminal Inquiry Into Afghan Civilians’ Deaths

KABUL, Afghanistan — The United States military has reopened a criminal investigation into a series of at least 17 murders of civilians in 2012 and 2013 for which Afghan officials blamed an Army Special Forces team, a senior Western official here said on Monday.

A spokesman for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command in Quantico, Va., Chris Grey, confirmed that a criminal investigation of the deaths was underway, although he did not say when the investigation had begun. The senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter, said the investigation had been reopened in recent weeks.

“All death investigations conducted by U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command Special Agents are conducted to a thoroughness standard, not necessarily to a timetable,” Mr. Grey said, in an emailed response to questions. “The investigation has yet to be finalized. During the case review process, information and leads were identified that demand further investigation.”

Afghan military investigators who carried out their own investigation on the orders of Hamid Karzai, the president at the time, had blamed interrogators who were part of a Special Forces A-Team based in the Nerkh district of Wardak Province, including an interpreter who was said to have dual Afghan-American citizenship and three American soldiers who worked with him.

Afghan investigators found a videotape showing the interpreter, identified as Zakaria Kandahari and reportedly also known as Zikria Noorzai, torturing and questioning a man who had been detained in Nerkh, an area with a strong Taliban presence. The Special Forces A-Team was based next to the district government headquarters in Nerkh, along with a Central Intelligence Agency unit of irregular troops and Afghan forces, the investigators said.

Some of the Afghan irregulars, including Mr. Kandahari, were working there under the guise of being part of a mine-clearing charity, and were under American control and direction, the Afghan investigators said.

When Afghan officials demanded that the American military turn Mr. Kandahari over for questioning, it reported that he had suddenly escaped from the Special Forces base, a heavily guarded facility in the middle of largely hostile territory, leading to a furious reaction from Mr. Karzai.

Mr. Kandahari was later arrested and allegedly told Afghan military investigators that the Nerkh detainees, who were picked up over a period of weeks and months for questioning by the A-Team, were killed by his American handlers. He said the same was true for the detainee he was seen torturing in the video.

The arrests of the detainees took place late in 2012 and early in 2013, with the bodies of the missing men discovered over the next several months. After Mr. Karzai ordered the A-Team to leave Wardak Province, what were believed to be many of the bodies were found buried close to the A-Team base in Nerkh.

At one point, the Afghan president expressed his anger by ordering all American Special Forces out of Wardak Province, a strategic area only a half-hour’s drive from the Afghan capital. The move was later reversed.

With family members of the disappeared men staging protests and accusing the American military and Mr. Kandahari of killing them, Mr. Karzai ordered an investigation and also demanded Mr. Kandahari’s immediate arrest. Top officials close to Mr. Karzai said it was clear that the Special Forces had protected Mr. Kandahari from capture.

Mr. Kandahari was later apprehended by the National Directorate for Security, Afghanistan’s intelligence service, and officials said he would be tried for murder. The outcome of that trial has not been publicized.

American military officials insisted that Mr. Kandahari was not an American citizen; many Afghan officials disputed that. The Americans said that Mr. Kandahari had left the control of the American military long before the video of him carrying out torture surfaced, but Afghan officials said the torture session took place on an American base while Mr. Kandahari was working for the Americans.

At the time of the controversy, the American military responded hotly to the allegations, both from Afghan officials and from the Western news media.

“We have done three investigations down there, and all absolve I.S.A.F. forces and Special Forces of all wrongdoing,” a military spokesman for the American-led military coalition, which was then known as the International Security Assistance Force, said in July 2013.

Family members and other witnesses to the disappearances in Nerkh said they were never approached by American military investigators to hear their own accounts. Many said they saw their loved ones taken away by Mr. Kandahari, accompanied by Special Forces soldiers, never to be seen alive again.

Those were not criminal investigations, however, as the one now reportedly is. The military had later opened and then closed a 2013 criminal investigation into the killings, and the current reopened investigation appears to be a continuation of that.

“Although time is very important,” Mr. Grey said, “C.I.D. Special Agents are trained and determined to get to the truth regardless of how long that might take.” He pointed out that carrying out a criminal investigation in a war zone posed special difficulties because of dangers to investigators, lack of access to witnesses, and “subject and victim identities in a foreign, austere and chaotic environment.”

Patricia Gossman, the senior Afghan researcher for Human Rights Watch, cautiously welcomed reports of the military’s criminal investigation, which she said was overdue.

“This is the kind of thing that should have happened when there were clear indications a crime had happened,” she said. “It is a positive step but we need to see if they undertake the kind of investigation this requires: talking to the witnesses and families, and also looking at it from the point of view of command responsibility, not just whether American forces were directly involved, but whether they were aware of what happened as well.”