Afghan police have arrested 12 people in connection with the assassination of Vice President and Public Works Minister Abdul Qadir Saturday morning, an Interior Ministry official told Reuters today.

Those held include 10 of the guards at Qadir's ministry, who allegedly did nothing as 36 bullets were fired at the late vice president's car.  "So far, we have not found any concrete evidence to show who was responsible," the official said.  "None of the 12 has confessed to anything" (Reuters/Globe and Mail, July 8).

Police and soldiers were deployed around Kabul yesterday as transitional President Hamid Karzai and other Afghan officials gathered to mourn Qadir at a mosque.  Karzai told reporters that he has appointed a commission to investigate the incident and could ask for assistance from Germany, the United States and other countries if the Afghan investigation does not show progress soon (Pamela Constable, Washington Post, July 8).

Afghan ministers decided at a meeting today to ask for the aid of the International Security Assistance Force in investigating the killing.  "The goal is to have an impartial, just and professional investigation so that the criminals are brought to justice as quickly as possible," Karzai spokesman Fazel Akbar said (Agence France-Presse/La Tribune, July 8, UN Wire translation).

Various theories concerning the killing circulated over the weekend, including the possibility of a Taliban hit against the former Northern Alliance commander (Reuters/Globe and Mail).  Some Pashtun mourners said Qadir was killed because he was the highest-ranking Pashtun in the transitional government after Karzai (Constable, Washington Post).

The Financial Times reports that Haji Zaman, a rival from Qadir's home province of Nangahar who was forced to flee after a power struggle there, is seen as the slain vice president's biggest enemy (Charles Clover, Financial Times, July 8).

Offering another theory, the New York Times quotes a senior Afghan official as saying yesterday that the killing may have been the work of eastern drug barons upset at the poppy eradication campaign Qadir was heading.  The official said Qadir recently complained that some of the money meant to compensate farmers for destroying their opium crops had not been distributed.  "In some instances, there were problems with the flow of the money.  There were people who didn't get any," the official said.  "That was a concern to Mr. Qadir.  That is why it is now a concern to us" (Dexter Filkins, New York Times, July 8).

Some Afghans reportedly believed Qadir enriched himself through the opium trade, and rumors circulated that his men had burned only 20 percent of the opium they confiscated in a raid of Nangahar's largest drug market earlier this year.  "Qadir had many enemies among the drug dealers and rival warlords in Nangahar," said a senior Western diplomat.

A religious law professor at Kabul University, Abdul Khader, said the assassination could also have been orchestrated by al-Qaeda.  "If it is al-Qaeda, it means the other government ministers are also in danger," he said (Dusan Stojanovic, Associated Press/Yahoo! News, July 8).

ISAF said its officers believe the assassination was "an individual attack designed to destabilize the government" (Clover, Financial Times).  A spokesman for Lakhdar Brahimi, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's special representative for Afghanistan, said Saturday that the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan "condemns this heinous act in the strongest terms and calls upon the transitional administration to undertake without delay an in-depth investigation that will throw full light on the circumstances of this murder" (UNAMA release/ReliefWeb, July 6).