Vice President Qadir is buried in home-town

(7 Jul 2002)

1. Soldiers lift coffin of assassinated vice President Abdul Qadir onto shoulders and move off from his family home towards White Mosque
2. Funeral procession goes past
3. Mourners in White Mosque
4. Coffins and mourners at White Mosque
5. Daughter and man leading final prayers
6. Wide of crowd of mourners at White Mosque
7. Coffin of Abdul Qadir carried off towards graveyard, tilts down to coffin of slain driver and brother-in-law
8. Military vehicles bearing coffin, and crowds of mourners
9. Coffin on gun carriage
10. Pan of large crowd of mourners following coffin
11. Various of mourners following coffin
12. Various of coffin lowered into ground at Amir Shaheed Gardens as gunshot resounds in air
13. Close up mourner's face
14. Coffin lowered into grave
15. Mourner
16. Mourners surrounding grave
17. Various of earth shoveled into grave
18. Wide of mourners around grave

STORYLINE:

Afghanistan's Vice President Abdul Qadir was buried on Sunday with full military honors one day after he was gunned down in an attack that Afghans fear may bring new instability to a nation struggling to build peace after decades of war.

An estimated 10-thousand people followed Qadir's body, carried on a gun-carriage, as it moved from the city's White Mosque to the grave in the lush Amir Shaheed Gardens in the city center. Afghan troops in full uniform marched in the procession.

As the body, wrapped in a green, red and black Afghan flag, was lowered into the grave, a Pashtu-language poem read over a loudspeaker hailed Qadir as "a unique man" and "a hero of Afghanistan."

Seven shots were fired into the air, and the male mourners wept and chanted his name. Women were not allowed at the burial.

Abdul Qadir was appointed as one of five vice presidents during last month's Afghan grand council and also served as minister of public works and governor of Nangarhar province.

He died on Saturday in a hail of bullets after two gunmen opened fire on his vehicle as it was leaving his office in Kabul. His driver, who was also a son-in-law, was killed too but the gunmen escaped.

Qadir was the most prominent ethnic Pashtun in the government after President Hamid Karzai, and his assassination threatens to stir unrest here in Nangarhar province, a relatively wealthy trading and opium poppy-growing region that borders Pakistan.

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