The Afghan soldier suspected of killing four French troops last month had serious mental health problems and a history of violence, but he wasn't a Taliban insurgent, his father told McClatchy.
Mohammad Noor said his son, Abdul Saboor, once tried to burn his stepmother and her children alive, was expelled from home for aggressive behaviour and later was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Afghanistan.
The revelations raise fresh doubts about the Afghan army's process for vetting the soldiers to whom the United States and its allies are planning to hand responsibility for securing Afghanistan. An Afghan defense ministry interrogation report leaked to McClatchy last week said that Saboor twice bribed an army recruiter to forge papers so that he could enter the service - the second time after he'd deserted the army and spent time in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, a hotbed of Taliban influence.
Even now, nearly three weeks after the January 20 attack, Afghan authorities haven't contacted Saboor's family for an interview or to inform them that Saboor was taken into custody after the shooting.
"I am sure that he had no contact with the Taliban," Noor told McClatchy at his home in Chino Ghondai village in southern Kabul province, less than an hour's drive from the Afghan capital. He said that the shooting "may have been the result of a psychiatric attack he had at that time."
Daulat Waziri, deputy spokesman for the Afghan defense ministry, told McClatchy that an investigation was ongoing. Besides Saboor, five Afghan army personnel and two civilians have been arrested in connection with the shooting, Waziri said. One of the civilians, he said, was a person charged with forging a national ID card; Saboor's interrogation report said that the army recruiter he bribed provided him with fake ID papers.
Noor said his son had spent time in Pakistan, although he couldn't confirm the account in the defense ministry's interrogation report that Saboor travelled to Peshawar in the months before the January 20 shooting. Noor didn't know how many times his son had been to Pakistan, or when, because eight years ago he kicked him out of the house because of his increasingly erratic and violent behaviour.
Saboor's behaviour deteriorated after his mother died when he was 13, his father said, and he became angry and aggressive when Noor remarried.
