Four Czech soldiers charged over Afghan man's death

PRAGUE: Czech military police have charged four soldiers over the death of an Afghan man who had killed a Czech dog handler in 2018, a prosecutor said Monday.

The Respekt weekly said Wahidullah Khan shot Czech soldier Tomas Prochazka dead and wounded another two soldiers at the Shindand air base in western Afghanistan in October 2018.

He gave himself up at once, he was questioned by Afghan, Czech and American soldiers and died in hospital shortly afterwards.

Respekt cites a 2019 report by the US Army Criminal Investigation Command saying Khan had been brutally beaten up during the interrogation.

It quotes an Afghan interpreter as saying Khan was heard crying in pain during the Czech interrogation and that he was beaten by the American soldiers too.

"We are supervising the criminal proceedings," Hynek Olma, a prosecutor at the regional prosecution office in the second Czech city of Brno, told AFP without giving any details.

"The case of the four charged soldiers is being handled by criminal authorities," Defence Minister Lubomir Metnar said in a tweet.

"Until a legitimate decision is passed, I will honour the presumption of innocence and will not give any further comments on the case," he added.

Respekt said two of the four Czech elite soldiers were charged with violent blackmail and disobedience, and the other two with negligence and breach of duty.

It added eight US soldiers were also being investigated over the incident, but they have not been charged yet.

Czech soldiers are deployed in Afghanistan within the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission. NATO said earlier it would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by September 11.

Over two decades of military involvement in Afghanistan, US-led foreign forces have faced allegations of torture, illegal killings and war crimes by rights groups.

In November, an Australian military inquiry found that the country's special forces deployed in southern Afghanistan had "unlawfully killed" 39 Afghan civilians and prisoners.

Such revelations had often been used by the Taliban to demand the withdrawal of foreign forces from the country.