KABUL — The discovery of the body of a second U.S. sailor who vanished in Afghanistan last week only deepened the mystery of the men’s disappearance nearly 60 miles from their base in an area controlled by the Taliban.
An investigation is underway, but with both sailors dead, U.S. authorities remained at a loss Thursday to explain what two junior enlisted men in noncombat jobs were doing driving alone in Logar province, where much of the countryside is not under government control.
“This is like a puzzle,” said Abdul Wali, deputy head of the governing council in Logar.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Justin McNeley — father of two boys aged 5 and 9 — from Kingman, Ariz., and previously of Wheat Ridge, and Petty Officer 3rd Class Jarod Newlove, 25, from the Seattle area, disappeared in the province July 23. McNeley’s body was recovered there Sunday, and Newlove’s body was pulled from a river Wednesday evening, Afghan officials said.
The U.S. Navy confirmed Newlove’s death Thursday.
In Seattle, Newlove’s father, Joseph Newlove, told a TV station that his son’s duties were limited to Kabul, and he wondered why his son would have been so far off base.
“He had never been out of that town,” Newlove told KOMO-TV. “So why would he go out of that town? He wouldn’t have.”
Officials at the NATO-led coalition headquarters in Kabul have not offered an explanation as to why the men were driving a heavily armored vehicle so far from their base at Camp Julien, a training facility on the western edge of the city.
Senior military officials in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the sailors were never assigned anywhere near where their bodies were found.
Samer Gul, chief of Logar’s Charkh district, said the two sailors, in a four-wheel drive armored sport utility vehicle, were seen Friday by a guard working for the district chief’s office, who tried to flag down the vehicle without success.
A group of Taliban tried to stop the vehicle, but when it didn’t, insurgents opened fire and the occupants in the vehicle shot back, he said. The NATO official confirmed that the vehicle had been shot up.
Gul said there is a well-paved road that leads into the Taliban area and suggested the Americans may have mistaken that for the main highway — which is much older and more dilapidated.
Wali, the deputy head of the governing council in Logar, insisted the Taliban did not plan the incident.
“The Taliban were just joking around with each other and they suddenly saw a big armored vehicle coming toward them,” he said. “They thought it might be a trick — that if it got too close, there might be an airstrike against them — so they opened fire.”
The Taliban did not claim responsibility for the missing sailors for more than 48 hours after the ambush.
Mohammad Rahim Amin, a local government chief, said security had tightened around the Taliban, who were under pressure from Afghan forces, intelligence officials and coalition troops searching for the missing service member.
“It makes sense that the Taliban had nowhere to go, so they killed him,” Amin said, referring to Newlove.
