Mohammedi held talks on pipeline project

Afghanistan's Minister for Petroleum and Mines Juma Mohammed Mohammedi had on Saturday held talks in Islamabad on a multi-billion dollar pipeline project that would link Turkmenistan and Pakistan via Afghanistan.

At the meeting, ministers and officials from the three countries had agreed to invite India in the $2.5 billion gas line project despite New Delhi's estranged relations with Islamabad.

Salman Saqib, an Afghan diplomat in Karachi, told reporters that another Afghan minister was arriving in Karachi to identify bodies and fly them back home. Three of his aides were from his own ministry, while the fourth from the foreign ministry.

The Afghan delegation and a Chinese executive were travelling to a copper and gold mining project being run by the Chinese firm in Saindak, in the Balochistan province near the Afghan frontier.

Mohammadi, who was keen to develop and modernise the mining industry of his war ravaged country, was travelling to see the mining techniques and the technology being employed by the Chinese.

Mohammadi, a former official of the World Bank, lived in the United States when the orthodox Taliban militia ruled Afghanistan. He returned to his country to join Hamid Karzai's U.S.-backed government.

This was second crash in Pakistan in less than a week.

On Thursday, a Pakistan Air Force Fokker F-27 turboprop carrying Air Chief Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir, his wife and several senior officials crashed on a hill 30km from the northwestern town of Kohat.

Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf conveyed his condolences to his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai. "I was deeply shocked to hear the sad news," Musharraf said in the message.

Karzai, in Malaysia for the Non Aligned Movement summit, expressed "shock and sorrow" and called the death of Mohammadi "a tragic loss."

Kabul confirmed that the mines ministry's planning director Mohammad Amin Sadiq and advisers Ahmad Latif Alumi and Rehmatullah Popal were killed.

Mohammadi's death is a further blow to Karzai's struggling administration, which has been blighted by the murder of two other ministers in just over one year.

Tourism Minister Abdul Rehman was assassinated by a mob at Kabul's airport last February while Haji Abdul Qadir, a vice-president, was shot dead as he left his office in July.

Mohammedi was a member of the vast Afghan diaspora who returned home to help rebuild his country after the fall of the Taliban brought an end to two decades of war. Mohammedi, an ethnic Pashtun who was in his late 60s, is survived by a wife and four children, Wardak said.

Mohammedi was appointed to his ministerial post during a historic loya jirga, or grand council, that put in place Afghanistan's current government in Kabul in June.