Diary – 21 September 2002

I shall call him the Unknown Afghan Hero. The BBC footage of the assassination attempt on Hamid Karzai showed a civilian greeting the Afghan president through the window of his limousine. Suddenly, several shots rung out and this civilian, reacting instantaneously, swung round and hurled himself upon the would-be assassin, as did another man, before all three were killed in a hail of American friendly fire. It was a dramatic moment recorded on videotape and beamed into our sitting-rooms, yet so much of the press got it wrong. Reuters reports mentioned that ‘both Karzai’s attacker and an Afghan bodyguard died in the shootout’, though not the civilian hero. The Sunday Times published a photograph of the civilian’s bloodied corpse with the caption ‘Ominous: one of the men shot after the attempt to kill Karzai’, implying his complicity in the assassination attempt. The Guardian Unlimited website reported that Karzai’s US bodyguards ‘killed the gunman and two other men, both carrying weapons’.