Kandahar:
Afghan President Hamid Karzai's younger brother, a key powerbroker in the south of the country, was assassinated on Tuesday depriving NATO of a vital if controversial ally.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the killing of Ahmed Wali Karzai in his own home, but spy officials said the Kandahar provincial council chief was shot twice in the head by a guest who was apparently an old friend.
It raises disturbing questions about possible infiltration among those closest to the Karzai family and is also a severe blow to NATO and the Afghan leadership in Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban insurgency.
His death comes as NATO troops start withdrawing from the country and Western nations search for a political solution after a decade of war.
The gunman was not searched on arrival at the younger Karzai's Kandahar home because they were close friends, a senior official with Afghanistan's spy agency told AFP.
Naming the assassin as "Sardar Mohammad", the spy official said the killer was a village elder in Karzai's home village.
"They were meeting alone in a room," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"Sardar takes off his pistol and shoots him twice in the head. He was hit in the head. The bodyguards rushed to the room and shot Sardar (dead)."
Describing the gunman as in "his late 30s or early 40s", he added: "Wali knew him from a long time ago."
The assassination came just before the Afghan leader received French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was on a surprise visit to Afghanistan where he announced that Paris would recall 1,000 soldiers by the end of next year.
Interior ministry spokesman Seddiq Seddiqi said: "One of the very important figures in Afghanistan has been martyred. We condemn this attack. We will provide further information later."
"He was shot dead at his house by one of the visiting guests, not by a bodyguard, at around 11:30 am (0700 GMT)," said an official at Afghanistan's intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security.
The official confirmed that the gunman was killed by bodyguards.
A number of Wali Karzai's guests were also killed in the gunfire, it was claimed, but there was no immediate confirmation on who or how many died.
Wali Karzai -- the half-brother of the Afghan leader -- was for years a deeply controversial figure, dogged by allegations of unsavoury links to Afghanistan's lucrative opium trade and private security firms.
American documents leaked by Internet whistleblower WikiLeaks late last year painted him as a corrupt drugs baron, lifting the lid on Western thoughts long kept private.
Kandahar is a make-or-break battleground in the US-led fight to defeat the insurgency, where the United States has poured in thousands of extra troops to wrest the initiative from the Taliban and bolster the Afghan government.
In April, Kandahar's provincial police chief was killed in a suicide bombing by one of his own bodyguards, who was believed to have known him for 10 years.
The governor of the restive province, Tooryalai Wesa, told AFP last month that insurgents in the area had recently changed tactics, using "sporadic assassinations" to sow fear among officials and the general population.
A string of attacks on government buildings by armed militants killed four people in Kandahar city in early May, while in April nearly 500 inmates escaped through a tunnel dug from the main city prison.
Karzai, who ran his own private militia in the province, is reported to have said the plethora of independent security firms run by different men in the region should be brought under the control of one man.
Afghanistan is ranked one of the most corrupt countries in the world, where official graft undermines public support for the Western-backed government and is believed to help fuel support for the Taliban insurgency.
"The meeting with AWK (Wali Karzai) highlights one of our major challenges in Afghanistan: how to fight corruption and connect the people to their government, when the key government officials are themselves corrupt," said a US cable in 2009.