Five British Soldiers Shot Dead by Afghan Police Officer

According to the BBC six other British soldiers, along with two Afghan National Police officers, were also injured during the attack. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has indicated that the Taliban has accepted responsibility for the attack, the gunman has been identified as an officer called Gulbuddin and it is thought that he may have had an accomplice, but it does not seem to be clear that the gunman is actually a member of that group. Tribal leaders have supposedly linked the Taliban to the incident also. There are reports that the gunman was extremely unhappy with his commanding officers who, the Telegraph reports, had constantly been moving him around the country as he performed his duties. Indeed the London Times quotes Abdul Ahad Helmandwal, the head of the Nad-e’Ali district council, the attack occurred in the village of Shin Kalay in the Nad-e’Ali district, as saying that Gulbuddin shot at the police commander inside the compound, and his deputy, first, before turning his machine gun on the British troops. The British troops were drinking tea at the time they were attacked and the Telegraph states that they had removed their body armor and helmets. Of those soldiers killed, their names have not been released, three were serving with the Grenadier Guards and two were with the Royal Military Police. If Gulbuddin is not a member of the Taliban, or connected with it in some way, then he may been coerced by its members in to carrying out the attack, during which it is reported he was also wounded. The London Times suggests that Gulbuddin may have been using heroin prior to the attack. A graduate of the Afghan police academy a year ago Gulbuddin has been with the police for two years in total and is from the north of Helmand, a province in the southwest of Afghanistan. Tributes have been paid to the dead soldiers by Gordon Brown and British opposition leader David Cameron. Whilst Gen Stanley McChrystal, commander of the International Security Assistance Force, has spoken to the Minister of the Interior in Afghanistan, who has expressed his regret at what happened and promised a full investigation. One person not surprised by the incident inside the compound, which is next to a checkpoint named Blue 25, is Peter Galbraith, the former deputy head of the UN mission in Afghanistan who resigned his post because of his unhappiness at the manner in which the Afghan presidential election was conducted. Mr Galbraith explained:

It is a terrible tragedy but it is, I won't quite say inevitable, but it is not surprising. The process of police training and recruiting has been very rushed. Normally the police get an eight-week training course. That is actually very short and there isn't a lot of vetting of police before they are hired. And actually, in recent months, they shortened the training programme from eight weeks to five weeks because they wanted to get more police boots on the ground in advance of the elections. So there was a real rush to recruit an additional 10,000, particularly in the south, particularly in Kandahar and Helmand provinces. So it is not totally surprising that people were recruited who may have had Taliban sympathies or were infiltrated into the police by the Taliban although I don't know yet whether in this particular episode that is exactly what happened

Since 2001 229 members of the British armed forces have lost their lives in Afghanistan, with over 90 of those deaths being in 2009. The London Times is putting the exact number during 2009 at 94 but the BBC and the Telegraph put this year's total number of dead at 92. Two soldiers from the U.S. were killed by a policeman in eastern Afghanistan only a month ago.