HIGHLIGHTS: Assassinated Leader to be Buried in Ancestral Home, Eastern City of Jalalabad||Washington & Kabul Coordinating Investigation Effort||Attack Could've been Taliban-inspired Say Political Observers|| STORY: Afghan President Hamid Karzai launched an investigation into the assassination of one of his three vice presidents, Haji Abdul Qadir, as preparations got under way on Sunday for the slain leader's funeral. (Read photo caption)

Qadir's body was expected to be flown later to his ancestral home in the eastern city of Jalalabad.

Karzai declared that Tuesday would be a national day of mourning and said flags would be flown at half mast throughout Afghanistan and in Afghan diplomatic missions.

The president set up a five-member delegation headed by another vice president Karim Khalili to investigate the daylight killing of Qadir in the capital Kabul on Saturday.

President Bush said his national security team had been in touch with the Afghan leader following the assassination.
Qadir, shot dead in his car in an ambush outside his office compound, was a veteran warlord who was a Pashtun like Karzai and a key player in a nation riven by regional rivalries. He was also public works minister and the second cabinet minister to be assassinated in Afghanistan this year.

In February, Tourism Minister Dr. Abdul Rehman was killed at the airport under circumstances which have never been made clear.

Kabul police chief Basir Salangi said two gunmen fired some 36 rounds at the car. Witnesses said that the driver was killed, two passengers were wounded and the gunmen escaped by taxi.

MINISTRY SECURITY GUARDS ARRESTED

Salangi told reporters all 10 of the ministry's security guards, who had been appointed by Qadir's predecessor at the public works ministry, Abdul Khaliq Fazal, were arrested.

General Deen Mohammad Jurat, head of security for the interior ministry, told reporters those responsible for the killing were "enemies of the government and members of al Qaeda and anti-government groups."

"I am 100 percent sure that these people (guards) were involved because they were merely two or three meters away from the site of the killing and didn't do anything to try to stop it," he said.

Qadir's death illustrated the problems facing Karzai just weeks after the appointment of a cabinet to lead the country out of 23 years of war and prepare for national elections in 18 months time.

TOO EARLY TO SAY WHO BEHIND ASSASSINATION

"It is too early to say who was behind the assassination," Karzai's spokesman Sayed Fazl Akbar told Reuters.

"Haji Qadir had so many enemies it could be anyone," said Pakistani newspaper editor and Afghan expert Rahimullah Yusufzai.

A member of Afghanistan's biggest ethnic group, Qadir's power base was in the strategic eastern province of Nangahar, where Osama bin Laden set up his base in the early 1990s.

But he was also a rare Pashtun member of the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance which swept into Kabul with U.S. help in November to oust their longtime foes and bin Laden's protectors, the Taliban.

"If this government falls then you go back to civil war, the north against the south," historian Martin McCauley told Sky TV.

One Afghan expert said it could have been a Taliban-organized hit because of Qadir's links with the Northern Alliance. "He was one of the few Pashtuns in the Northern Alliance, so it could have been a kind of Taliban hit," he said.

Qadir's brother, Mujahideen commander Abdul Haq, was executed by the Taliban shortly after the United States launched air strikes last year to punish the Taliban for sheltering suspected September 11 mastermind bin Laden.

PHOTO CAPTION

Afghan Vice President Haji Abdul Qadir is seen in Islamabad in this May 29, 2002 photo. Unidentified gunmen assassinated Qadir, one of Afghanistan's three vice-presidents in broad daylight in Kabul on July 6, 2002, in a fresh blow to efforts by President Hamid Karzai to impose his authority on the volatile country. (Mian Khursheed/Reuters