User:Geo Swan/Rahmatullah Mansoor

Mullah Rahmatullah Mansoor is a citizen of Afghanistan. The Guardian reports that Rahmatullah was a former Taliban official who returned to Afghanistan in 2005, and had a secret meeting with Hamid Karzai. The Guardian article states that Rahmatullah stated that members of the Taliban were tired of fighting, but the continued extrajudicial detention of captives in Guantanamo, and the alleged Koran abuse were a roadblock to peace talks.

In April 2010, while he was serving as a judge in Khost Province, NATO forces fired on a car killing four of his relatives. Mansoor said the dead were two of his sons, aged 14 and 17, and two nephews, aged 18 and 25. Initially NATO spokesmen claimed that the shooting was justified because the bio-metric data of one of the dead was found in its bio-metric database. However, they withdrew this claim when it was pointed out that, as a member of the Afghan Police, his nephew Amrullah would also have been listed in the database.

The Wall Street Journal published different details than other press reports. Its report called Mansoor a "provincial government employee" -- not a judge It list the ages of the dead as 7-18, where other sources listed 13-26.