KABUL, Afghanistan — Sergeant Nargis went to work Monday with murder on her mind.
By the end of the morning, she would succeed, becoming responsible for this year’s 62nd insider killing, in which Afghan security forces have killed American or other coalition personnel. Such killings have greatly increased this year, but Sergeant Nargis’s killing of an American police adviser, Joseph Griffin, 49, of Mansfield, Ga., ranks among the strangest.
Was she an Iranian agent, as Afghan officials suggested on Tuesday after they found her Iranian passport at home? Was she mentally ill, as some police interrogators said privately and other Afghan officials speculated publicly?
The first theories, that she was either a jilted lover or a Taliban infiltrator, were firmly rejected by the authorities on Tuesday, but even her interrogators were left perplexed by her motives.
Making the case even stranger was her job: a uniformed police officer attached to the Interior Ministry’s legal and gender equality unit, what would normally be seen as a plum job, one that is entirely underwritten by international aid, both American and European, earmarked specifically for women’s rights issues.
All she would tell her interrogators was that she went to work aiming to kill someone important, and that she did not much care who, officials said.
“I was myself asking her, trying to make her talk about what could make her do such a thing, and all she would say was she wanted to kill a high official,” said Gen. Mohammad Zaher, the director of the criminal investigation division of the Police Department in Kabul Province, who attended her interrogations after her arrest on Monday. What she would not say, however, was why she had done it, he said. “We just don’t know.”
Her first stop was the Interior Ministry compound in downtown Kabul, where her own office was located. General Zaher said she told questioners that she had prowled the compound looking for someone important enough to kill.
“She saw two foreign women on the grounds of the M.O.I., and thought of killing them,” he said. They were foreign aid workers who had been gathering warm clothing for refugee children and were looking for police assistance in distributing it. “She said she thought they were not worth killing.”
So instead she went down the street and around the corner, about half a mile away, to the sprawling compound that includes the Kabul police headquarters and the Kabul governor’s office.
There, according to Afghan officials and to what they said was her own confession, she gained access by hiding her weapon on her body — women are searched much less thoroughly because of cultural norms, and only by other women, who are often in short supply. As an official of the gender unit at the ministry, she probably had experience carrying out such searches herself and would know how to evade them.
Afghan security officials themselves have a well-founded fear of attacks by their own forces — “green on green,” or Afghan on Afghan, attacks have been even more common lately than attacks on foreign forces, with at least 14 Afghan police officers killed in such episodes in the past week. So even a uniformed police officer could not easily gain access to a building where she was not assigned.
According to the general’s account, she first went to the restroom inside police headquarters, where she removed the gun from under her clothing and put it in her uniform pocket, where it would be more accessible. She then tried to get into the Kabul governor’s office, but was turned away by guards there because she had no appointment. Next she tried the Kabul police chief’s office, and again was turned away. She told interrogators she wanted to kill either of them.
Sergeant Nargis went downstairs to the ground floor, determined to kill someone immediately now that her gun was no longer hidden and she would be caught with it if she tried to leave.
