Afghanistan's fragile security was shattered yesterday when powerful Vice President Haji Abdul Qadir was assassinated by two gunmen close to his offices in the capital Kabul, officials said.

"The motive behind the assassination is not yet clear and we are investigating the case," Interior Minister Taj Mohammad Waardak told reporters.

Kabul police chief Bashir Salangi said that 10 guards at the Public Works Ministry had been arrested after the assassins escaped after spraying Qadir's car with bullets.

Salangi, who said that two gunmen had carried out the killing, said that "one of the guards came out and told one of the assassins that the minister was coming."

Another senior government official said that it appeared that two of Qadir's bodyguards had also been killed.

The killing once again throws a major question mark over new President Hamid Karzai's attempts to bring stability to Afghanistan at a time when security in Kabul had appeared to have improved.

Qadir, who was until recently governor of the main eastern province of Jalalabad, was one of the most powerful regional leaders in Afghanistan.

His appointment as one of five vice-presidents by Karzai last month was seen as a move to bring an end to the dominance of warlords by drawing them away from their traditional powerbases.

Despite the ouster of the Taliban regime last November, peace in Afghanistan remains elusive.

Former aviation minister Abdul

Rachman was also assassinated in February while bombers tried to kill Defence Minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim earlier this year in Jalalabad.

Qadir was shot dead near his Ministry of Public Works, a portfolio he was given last month by Karzai, at around 1.00 pm local time.

Witnesses said that Qadir's car had been shot at from close range by two men. The gunmen had been waiting near the gates to the ministry. They fired 36 rounds smashing the car windscreen and riddling the side with holes police said.

A total of five people were in Qadir's dark green Landcruiser. Two others were also killed while two escaped with injuries, according to an official who declined to be named.

"I arrived shortly afterwards. Qadir had bullet holes in his head and chest," an official at the scene said.

One source told AFP that Qadir's driver appeared to have been killed and the car itself smashed into a wall inside the ministry.

The vehicle was cordoned off by police but blood and bullet holes could be clearly seen.

Qadir was the brother of former Mujahideen commander Abdul Haq who was assassinated by the Taliban last October as he tried to stir up a rebellion against the fundamentalist Islamic militia.

Qadir, an ethnic Pashtun, was a firm supporter of Karzai and was one of five vice-presidents appointed at last month's Loya Jirga grand assembly.

He was also one of the wealthiest men in Afghanistan, with suspicions that his fortune was largely funded through the drugs trade.

A diplomatic source told the wire service recently that moves to give Qadir the interior ministry portfolio at the Loya Jirga grand assembly were blocked by the United States over his drugs links.

Qadir criticised Karzai's campaign to eradicate all opiumproducing poppy production which is one of the mainstays of the economy in eastern Afghanistan.

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Reuters adds: Qadir had forged a key alliance with the Tajik-led northern alliance to overthrow the hardline Taliban last year.

Qadir's appointment in June as one of President Hamid Karzai's deputies seemed to confirm his pivotal role in post-Taliban Afghanistan as the link between the strategic eastern province of Nangahar and the national government in Kabul.

A tall and imposing man with a trim white beard, Qadir had a chequered career that included being the first host in Afghanistan to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi Islamic militant who moved from Sudan to mountainous Nangahar in the early 1990s.

There was no indication that Qadir supported bin Laden's political plans but he let the Saudi use a fortified cave network in his province that later became the main base for the al Qaida organisation.

With the Kabul government dominated by Tajiks, Qadir actually seemed to devote much of his time not to national politics but to expanding his lucrative business links between the Gulf and Pakistan.