Lawyer for China's deposed Bo unsure if he can take case

BEIJING (Reuters) - A lawyer for disgraced former top Chinese politician Bo Xilai, who has been employed by the family to represent him, said on Thursday he was unable to say whether the government would allow him to represent Bo when the case comes to trial.

Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, and his former police chief, Wang Lijun, have both been jailed over a scandal stemming from the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood while Bo was Communist Party chief of the southwestern city of Chongqing.

The government last month accused Bo of corruption and of bending the law to hush up Heywood's murder. Before Bo is formally charged and tried, investigators must complete an inquiry and indict him.

Bo's mother-in-law, Fan Chengxiu, has retained Li Xiaolin, who was also part of Gu's legal team, to represent him.

But Li said he was unsure if the authorities would allow this. During Gu's trial, she had to use government-appointed lawyers.

"I still can't say whether I'll be able to get involved in this case. We will try our hardest to take it," Li told Reuters in a brief telephone interview.

Li said he did not know where Bo was and added that he had not seen him, as he had only just been employed by Fan.

"There are many things that are impossible to know. I know about as much as you do," Li said.

He declined to speculate on when a trial may happen.

"How can I estimate this? It's all guesswork," Li said.

China is expected to expel Bo from parliament on Friday, which would strip him of the immunity from prosecution he had enjoyed as one of its members, paving the way for formal criminal charges to be laid.

As China's prosecutors and courts come under Communist Party control they are most unlikely to challenge the accusations against him.

The Bo scandal has overshadowed preparations for an important party congress that opens November 8 and will unveil the country's new central leadership line-up.

Bo, 63, was widely seen as pursuing a powerful spot in that line-up before his career unraveled after his former police chief fled to a U.S. consulate in February, saying that Bo's wife had poisoned Heywood.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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Fighting rages in Syria before Brahimi's truce

AMMAN (Reuters) - Syrian troops bombarded a town near Damascus on Thursday and fighting raged in and around the northern city of Aleppo, a day before a proposed truce for a four-day Muslim religious holiday.

President Bashar al-Assad's government was expected to make a statement later in the day on whether it accepts the temporary ceasefire advocated by U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.

The Syrian authorities said on Wednesday they were still studying the plan, but Russia's envoy to the United Nations said Damascus had indicated to Moscow that it would agree to it.

China urged all sides to respect a ceasefire, an idea also backed by Syria's main regional ally Iran, but there was no sign on the ground of any let-up in the violence on the eve of Eid al-Adha, the biggest feast on the Muslim religious calendar.

Syrian troops pounded Harasta, near Damascus, with tank and rocket fire, killing five people, after rebels overran two army roadblocks on the edge of the town, on the main highway from the capital to the north, opposition campaigners said.

Rebels tried to maintain pressure on two army bases on main roads leading to the contested city of Aleppo, a key prize in the 19-month-old uprising against Assad's authoritarian rule.

"No one is taking the ceasefire seriously," said Moaz al-Shami, an opposition activist in Damascus.

"How can there be a ceasefire with tanks roaming the streets, roadblocks every few hundred meters and the army having no qualms about hitting civilian neighborhoods with heavy artillery? This is a regime that has lost all credibility."

Even if Assad accepts a truce, there may be no unified response from Syria's fractured opposition. Some armed groups have said they will abide by a ceasefire. Others, including the Islamist militant Al Nusra Front, have rejected it.

In Aleppo, where opposition activists reported more fighting and shelling, the rebel Shining Aleppo Division said it would observe the ceasefire despite "doubts over the credibility of the regime" if Assad stopped moving armored units, halted air raids and released thousands of prisoners held without trial.

WAR CRIMES

Brahimi's predecessor, former U.N. chief Kofi Annan, declared a ceasefire in Syria on April 12, but it soon became a dead letter, along with the rest of his six-point peace plan.

Violence has intensified since then, with daily death tolls compiled by opposition monitoring groups often exceeding 200.

"Harasta is being pummeled by tanks and rocket launchers deployed on the highway. The rebels are putting up a fight and it does not seem the army will be able to enter the town this time," said a Damascus resident, who gave his name as Mohammed.

Assad's force pushed into Harasta a month ago in an operation which opposition activists said killed 70 people.

In Geneva, U.N. war crimes investigators said they had asked to meet Assad to seek access for their team, which has been excluded from Syria since it began work a year ago. There was no word on how the Syrian leader would respond.

The inquiry led by Brazilian expert Paulo Pinheiro has been investigating atrocities by both sides in the conflict

In their latest report in August, the investigators said that Syrian government forces and allied militia had committed war crimes including murder and torture of civilians in what appeared to be a state-directed policy.

In Harasta, an opposition group described the town as a "disaster zone" after the shelling. "An (army) roadblock had been set up next to the main bakery. There is no water, no food, no medicine and prolonged power cuts," it said in a statement.

Activists also reported army artillery on the town of Anadan northwest of Aleppo. To the southwest of the city, rebels have been surrounding army barracks at the town of Orum al-Sughra, on the road between Aleppo and the Turkish border.

Assad's forces appear to have curbed a two-week-old rebel offensive against an army base at Wadi al-Deif to the south, near Maarat al-Numaan on the Aleppo-Damascus highway.

Rebel commanders said an armored column sent to defend the base 10 days ago had arrived near Maarat al-Numaan despite rebel attacks. The column, now deployed just south for the town, is bombarding rebel forces operating near Wadi al-Deif.

(Editing by Alistair Lyon)

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WikiLeaks releases hacked U.S. detainee rules

LONDON (Reuters) - The WikiLeaks website began publishing on Thursday what it said were more than 100 U.S. Defense Department files detailing military detention policies in camps in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay in the years after the September 11 attacks on U.S. targets.

In a statement, WikiLeaks criticized regulations it said had led to abuse and impunity and urged human rights activists to use the documents to research what it called "policies of unaccountability".

The statement quoted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as saying: "The 'Detainee Policies' show the anatomy of the beast that is post-9/11 detention, the carving out of a dark space where law and rights do not apply, where persons can be detained without a trace at the convenience of the U.S. Department of Defense."

"It shows the excesses of the early days of war against an unknown 'enemy' and how these policies matured and evolved, ultimately deriving into the permanent state of exception that the United States now finds itself in, a decade later."

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in London said they had no immediate comment.

In January, U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay said the United States was still flouting international law at Guantanamo Bay by arbitrarily and indefinitely detaining individuals.

Almost 3,000 people were killed in 2001 when militants from Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

Then President George W. Bush set up a detention camp at a U.S. naval base at Guantanamo in Cuba after U.S.-led forces invaded Afghanistan to expel al Qaeda following the September 11 raids. Of the 779 men held there, 167 remained as of mid-September 2012.

INTERROGATION

WikiLeaks said a number of documents it was releasing related to interrogation of detainees, and these showed direct physical violence was prohibited.

But it added the documents showed "a formal policy of terrorizing detainees during interrogations, combined with a policy of destroying interrogation recordings, has led to abuse and impunity".

A number of what can only be described as "policies of unaccountability" would also be released, it said.

One such document was a 2005 document "Policy on Assigning Detainee Internment Serial Numbers", it said.

"This document is concerned with discreetly 'disappearing' detainees into the custody of other U.S. government agencies while keeping their names out of U.S. military central records - by systematically holding off from assigning a prisoner record number," the WikiLeaks statement said.

WikiLeaks did not elaborate. But human rights activists say that after the September 11 attacks, the Central Intelligence Agency used "black sites" in friendly countries to interrogate and sometimes torture suspected militants beyond the reach of normal legal protections. The program's existence has never been officially acknowledged.

Assange, whose website previously angered the United States by releasing thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, has been holed up inside Ecuador's embassy in central London since June to avoid extradition to Sweden to face rape and sexual assault allegations. He denies wrongdoing.

(Reporting by William Maclean; Editing by Alison Williams)

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Libyan suspect in U.S. envoy attack killed in Cairo

CAIRO (Reuters) - A Libyan militant suspected by Egypt of involvement in last month's attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya has been killed during a raid by Egyptian security forces in Cairo, a security official said on Thursday.

The Libyan was killed on Wednesday in a raid targeting him and other militants with suspected links to al Qaeda in Cairo's eastern district of Nasr City, the official said. Four Egyptian militants were detained in the operation, he added.

The Libyan, identified as Karim Ahmed Essam el-Azizi, was killed by a bomb he had tried to use against the security forces during the raid, the security official said.

It was not immediately clear what role Azizi had played in the assault on the U.S. consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi on September 11, in which the ambassador, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans were killed.

The security official, who asked not to be named, said Azizi had been living in a rented apartment in Nasr City for the past three months. He said police had found 15 bombs and various weapons, including assault rifles, in the Libyan's flat.

The attack on the Benghazi consulate has become a highly politicized issue in the U.S. presidential election campaign.

It occurred during a wave of Muslim protest over an anti-Islam film produced in California, which also sparked violence against U.S. diplomatic missions in Tunisia and Egypt.

However, official emails obtained by Reuters showed that the White House and State Department were advised two hours after the consulate attack that an Islamist militant group had claimed responsibility.

President Barack Obama and other U.S. officials have acknowledged that the attack was a "terrorist" act by militants with suspected links to al Qaeda affiliates or sympathizers.

(Reporting by Ahmed Tolba and Yasmine Saleh, Writing by Yasmine Saleh; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

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Austrian incest rapist Fritzl divorces: report

VIENNA (Reuters) - Josef Fritzl, who held his daughter captive in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, has divorced his wife of 52 years for failing to visit him in prison, a magazine reported on Thursday.

The country's most notorious living criminal, now 77, is serving a life sentence in a prison unit for the criminally insane for incest, rape, coercion, false imprisonment, enslavement and for the negligent homicide of one of his infant sons.

A spokesman for the Krems district court in the Lower Austria region where Fritzl is imprisoned said he was not authorized to speak about private matters such as divorce.

Austrian magazine News said Fritzl's wife, Rosemarie, would receive no pension as a result of the divorce.

Fritzl imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth in the basement of the family home in Amstetten when she was 18. Rosemarie reported her missing but Fritzl ordered Elisabeth to write a letter saying she had run away.

Three of the seven children he fathered with Elisabeth lived with her until they were freed in 2008, and the other three surviving children were fostered by Fritzl and Rosemarie after being planted on their doorstep as foundlings by Fritzl.

When the case came to light, Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer said he would launch a campaign to restore Austria's reputation.

The Fritzl case followed the emergence in 2006 of the case of Natascha Kampusch, who was kidnapped at the age of 10 by Wolfgang Priklopil and sexually abused in a windowless cell under his house near Vienna for eight years.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan. Editing by Jeremy Gaunt.)

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China propaganda post likely to go to a conservative Hu loyalist

BEIJING (Reuters) - A loyal ally of Chinese President Hu Jintao is the front-runner to become propaganda minister during a once-in-a-decade generational leadership change, two sources said, but while media-savvy he is unlikely to drastically loosen tight controls.

Liu Qibao is tipped to be appointed to the post during the Communist Party's 18th congress, which opens on November 8, at which the party will anoint Xi Jinping as the country's fifth generation leader after Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.

China's apex policy-making body, the seven-member standing committee of the politburo, will be unveiled at the congress. The meeting will decide upon a whole slew of new officials, including provincial party heads and cabinet ministers.

"Liu Qibao is likely to take over as propaganda minister unless there is a change at the last minute," one source told Reuters, requesting anonymity to avoid repercussions for discussing secretive elite politics.

A second source confirmed that Liu was the front-runner for the position.

The post is vital to both instilling confidence in the party and its policies and ensuring a monopoly on the flow of information, something which is getting harder in modern, wired China, with web sites and several feisty new publications straining at the leash to uncover corruption and abuse of power.

Whoever runs it will be in charge of disseminating official policy and viewpoints as well as trying to combat rumours spread by the growing lack of public trust in mainstream state-run media's often mundane and occasionally dubious reporting.

Liu, 59, is currently party boss of the populous southwestern province of Sichuan, a job he was given in 2007. He won plaudits for rebuilding areas struck by the massive 2008 earthquake in which at least 87,000 people died.

Liu can be media-savvy, engaging ordinary people's problems via online questions and using the popular Twitter-like microblog Sina Weibo to send messages, unusual for a senior Chinese official.

"Speaking the truth -- these are the best words you can use," state media quoted Liu as telling a forum last year. "If you want the people to tell you the truth, then officials have to be brave enough to hear the truth, and they must create the right conditions for it."

Yet he has taken a hardline approach to tackling a surge of self-immolations and protests in restive ethnic Tibetan parts of the province, and has locked up some dissidents.

He has also come down hard on Sichuan-based dissidents, including Tan Zuoren, serving five years for subversion after documenting shoddy construction that contributed to deaths in the 2008 quake, and human rights advocate Chen Wei, jailed for nine years for writing essays critical of the government.

POOR BACKGROUND

Liu has direct experience working at the center of China's formidable propaganda machine, spending a year as a deputy editor at party mouthpiece the People's Daily from 1993 to 1994.

According to an official biography, he comes from a poor background and rose to the upper echelons of the party through Hu's powerbase of the Communist Youth League. For the party, these attributes make him an ideal candidate to run the propaganda team.

"They have to be very reliable in the eyes of the party," said Xiao Qiang, a China media expert at the University of California at Berkeley.

"For the propaganda department, they always need control freaks, not somebody who will make mistakes, and that seems like the kind of personality Liu Qibao has," he added.

Other candidates for the post include Hu Chunhua, party boss of the northern region of Inner Mongolia, and Wang Yang, the reform-minded party boss of the booming southern province of Guangdong, the sources said.

The job reports to an overall propaganda tsar on the standing committee.

If confirmed, Liu will replace Liu Yunshan, who is a preferred candidate to make it to the standing committee. The two Lius are not related.

Liu Yunshan has kept domestic media on a short leash and struggled to control China's increasingly unruly Internet, which has over 500 million users.

The new leadership will most probably keep those restrictions, nervous as it is about stability and the need to ensure one-party rule.

"I see no sign of a relaxation of media controls on the horizon. What are the benefits? If you do it, then all the bad stuff comes out," said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group.

(Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

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Ecuador worried by Assange health, seeks UK safe passage promise

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Ecuador is worried about the health of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and has asked Britain to guarantee him safe passage from its London embassy to a hospital if he needs medical treatment, a senior Ecuadorean diplomat said in Moscow.

"Assange has grown noticeably thinner, and we are very concerned about his health," Voice of Russia radio quoted Vice Foreign Minister Marco Albuja Martinez as saying in comments confirmed by the Ecuadorean embassy in Moscow.

"If he falls ill we will have to choose between two alternatives: to treat Assange in the embassy or hospitalize him," Albuja Martinez said on Tuesday. "This is a very serious situation and it can affect Assange's human rights."

Britain's Foreign Office said it had no immediate comment on the remarks.

Assange, whose whistleblowing website angered the United States by releasing thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, was arrested in December 2010 on an extradition warrant from Sweden where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of rape and sexual assault made by two women.

He denies wrongdoing and says he fears that if he is extradited to Sweden he could be transferred to the United States where he could face criminal charges punishable by death.

The 41-year-old Australian broke the conditions of his bail when he entered the Ecuadorean embassy in London in June shortly after running out of legal options to avoid being sent to Sweden. He was later granted diplomatic asylum by Ecuador, remains at the embassy and would risk arrest if he leaves.

Ecuador has asked the British Foreign Office for a document that would enable Assange to enter hospital safely if necessary and return to the embassy with refugee status, the Voice of Russia quoted Albuja Martinez as saying.

"Britain has not yet given assent to this request, but is considering its decision," he said.

Ecuador was pleased that Britain "did not reject it outright", he was quoted as saying of the request. "We will not put pressure on them and will patiently await an answer, so that Assange can receive medical treatment if necessary."

(Writing by Steve Gutterman; editing by Robert Woodward)

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Syria says army still undecided on ceasefire move

BEIRUT/CAIRO (Reuters) - Syria said on Wednesday its military command was still studying a proposal for a holiday ceasefire with rebels - contradicting international mediator Lakhdar Brahimi's earlier announcement that Damascus had agreed to a truce.

The statement threw Brahimi's efforts to arrange a pause in the bloodshed in Syria into even more confusion, as the rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad have given no indication they would be willing to sign up to it.

A previous ceasefire arrangement in April collapsed within days, with both sides accusing the other of breaking it.

Brahimi, the joint U.N.-Arab League special envoy, had crisscrossed the Middle East to push the warring factions and their international backers to agree to a truce over the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha - a mission that included talks with Assad in Damascus at the weekend.

"After the visit I made to Damascus, there is agreement from the Syrian government for a ceasefire during the Eid," Brahimi told a news conference at the Arab League in Cairo.

Within an hour, Syria's Foreign Ministry said the proposal was still being studied by the armed forces' leadership. "The final position on this issue will be announced tomorrow," a ministry statement said.

The holiday starts on Thursday and lasts three or four days. Brahimi did not specify the precise time period for a truce.

Nor did the initiative include plans for international observers and rebel sources had earlier told Reuters there was little point if it could not be monitored or enforced.

The two sides are now locked in a battle with huge potential ramifications in the northwest.

Syrian warplanes carried out bombing raids on Wednesday on the strategic northern town of Maarat al-Numan and nearby villages while rebels surrounded an army base to its east, an activist monitor said.

Five people from one family, including a child and a woman, were killed in the air strikes, according to Rami Abdelrahman, head of the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Maarat al-Numan has fallen to the rebels, effectively cutting the main north-south highway, a strategic route for Assad to move troops from the capital Damascus to Aleppo, Syria's largest city where the insurgents have taken a foothold.

But without control of the nearby Wadi al-Daif military base, their grip over the road is tenuous. Its capture would be a significant step towards creating a "safe zone" allowing them to focus forces on Assad's strongholds in southern Syria.

The rebels say the ferocity of counter-attacks by government forces shows how important holding the base is to Assad's military strategy.

Opposition activist footage on Wednesday showed a column of grey smoke rising after a bomb hit the village of Deir al-Sharqi, a few kilometers (miles) south of the base.

REFUGEES FLEE BOMBARDMENTS

Meanwhile, hundreds of Syrian refugees have poured into a makeshift refugee camp at Atimah overlooking the Turkish border, fleeing a week of what they said were the most intense army bombardments since the uprising began.

"Some of the bombs were so big they sucked in the air and everything crashes down, even four-storey buildings. We used to have one or two rockets a day, now for the past 10 days it has become constant, we run from one shelter to another. They drop a few bombs and it's like a massacre," one refugee, a 20-year-old named Nabil, told Reuters at the camp.

The army has lost swathes of territory in recent months and relies on air power and heavy artillery to push back the rebels fighting to topple Assad.

More than 32,000 people have been killed in the conflict, which began with peaceful pro-democracy protests in March 2011 before descending into civil war as repression increased.

Human Rights Watch said the Syrian air force had increased its use of cluster bombs across the country in the past two weeks. The New York-based organization identified, through activist video footage of unexploded bomblets, three types of cluster bombs which had fallen on and around Maarat al-Numan.

Cluster bombs explode in the air, scattering dozens of smaller bomblets over an area the size of a sports field. Most nations have banned their use under a convention that became international law in 2010, but which Syria has not signed.

Russia said on Wednesday the rebels had acquired portable surface-to-air missiles including U.S.-made Stingers - a weapon that would help bring down warplanes and helicopters which have bombed residential areas where rebels are hiding.

Opposition activist footage has shown rebels carrying Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles, but footage of Stingers has yet to appear.

In contrast to the Libya crisis last year, the West has shown little appetite to arm the Syrian rebels, worried that weapons would fall into the hands of Islamic militants.

Russia, which has supported Assad through the conflict, sold his government $1 billion worth of weapons last year and has made clear it would oppose an arms embargo in the U.N. Security Council.

A total of 190 people were killed across Syria on Tuesday, the Observatory said.

(Reporting by Marwan Makdesi in Damascus, Oliver Holmes in Beirut, Erika Solomon in Atiha, Yasmine Saleh and Tom Perry in Cairo, and Steve Gutterman in Moscow; Writing by Angus MacSwan; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

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Violence surges on Israel-Gaza frontier

GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinians fired dozens of rockets into Israel from Gaza on Wednesday and an Israeli air strike killed a militant in a surge of violence after the Emir of Qatar embraced the enclave's Hamas leadership with a visit.

Hamas claimed responsibility for some of the rocket and mortar bomb attacks, raising questions among Israelis over whether it had been emboldened by the Qatari visit on Tuesday that challenged the Islamist group's diplomatic isolation.

Hamas largely held its fire when other militant factions, including jihadi groups, had launched cross-border rocket attacks in recent months.

For its part, Hamas accused Israel of stepping up its attacks in the Gaza Strip to vent its anger over Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani's visit and pledged to "continue to hold a gun ... until Palestine is liberated".

A Hamas militant was killed on Wednesday in a second day of air strikes which Israel said were intended to stop rocket firings. On Tuesday, Israel killed three Hamas members, saying they had either launched attacks or were preparing to do so.

In southern Israel, three agricultural workers were wounded when a Palestinian rocket exploded near them.

Lieutenant-Colonel Avital Leibovich, a military spokeswoman, said 68 projectiles were fired at Israel by midday and that the Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepted seven of them. She said several homes were damaged by Palestinian fire.

Israel kept schools shut in communities near the Gaza border and residents were urged to remain indoors.

(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi, writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan, editing by Mark Heinrich)

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Shrinking military-led aid sparks concern among Afghans

GARDEZ, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Military-led teams set up to deliver aid projects in Afghanistan are winding down their operations, sparking concern among some local officials that the government is not ready to take over their development role.

Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) were a key part of U.S.-led forces' strategy "to win hearts and minds" in both Iraq and Afghanistan, building schools, hospitals and roads.

But now the teams, led by different countries in the coalition, are scaling back in Afghanistan as NATO-led forces hand over security responsibility to local commanders before most foreign combat troops pull out by the end of 2014.

Of the 22 existing today -- down from 26 last month -- three are expected to close by the middle of next year, NATO military officials have said.

The PRT in Paktia, a poor, mountainous province in eastern Afghanistan bordering Pakistan and used as a transit route by insurgents, was the first to open in Afghanistan in 2003.

The PRT was slated to close in December 2014, but the unit's U.S. commander said he was proposing to shut it earlier, in June 2013, on grounds that Afghans were ready to take on the work.

Naiz Mohammad Khalil, governor of the Sayid Karam district of Paktia, which borders Gardez and benefits from the PRT, said he would be "upset" when it closed.

"We need more mentors, we need them to stay for longer to train us more," he said in the provincial capital Gardez.

The PRT's commander, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel John Morse, said that when the PRT was established, "We were the only ones that were delivering the basic services to the people.

"That's important at the time when there was no one doing that, but now as the Afghan government stands up and starts to deliver basic services, the PRT can be looked (at) negatively, so we can't do that any longer," he told reporters during a media visit organized by NATO last week.

PROJECT NUMBERS DECLINE

In 2010, the Paktia PRT, headquartered at a U.S. military base near Gardez, managed 114 projects costing $15.5 million. In 2011, that fell to 101 projects worth $10 million and this year to 21 projects costing $800,000.

Of those projects, only three remain, Morse said.

Morse conceded that Kabul had not sent enough money to Paktia this year for development work. "We really felt that Paktia province is starting to stand on their own and they are getting funding from Kabul, (though) not in the amounts we would like to see," he said.

Before 2011, the Paktia PRT built agricultural dams, irrigation systems, wells, hospitals and schools. More recent projects have been more modest, ranging from solar lights for bazaars to a wall around a girls' school.

The main focus of the PRT's work has switched to advising and mentoring Afghan officials to provide services.

Paktia Governor Juma Khan Hamdard said while the provincial government would implement development projects well and act against corruption, he cautioned that the Afghan government did not have the money to make up for the fall in PRT funding.

"The ministers do not (have) money up in Kabul," Hamdard said.

The Paktia officials' fears echo greater concerns by Afghans over how development projects will be sustained once foreign donors pull the plug, which they are in the process of doing.

Donors pledged in Tokyo in July to give Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest countries, $16 billion in development aid through 2015. But there are no guarantees for what will happen after that date.

There are also concerns by major donors and aid organizations that weak political will and graft could prevent funds reaching the right people at a crucial time.

Some development projects in Paktia will continue, paid for by international donors.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. government aid arm, is financing one of the most important projects in Paktia, the paving of a section of highway connecting Gardez with the neighboring province of Khost.

The World Bank is funding an Afghan-led project to build the Machalgho dam in Paktia, although work on the project, under the supervision of an Afghan ministry, has been delayed.

USAID will continue to work in Afghanistan after the Paktia PRT closes, but projects will be run from Kabul and carried out by charities or local people, said Justin Gordon, USAID senior field program officer for Paktia province.

He said Afghan officials were generally in a position to take more development responsibility but the situation varied.

(Editing by Amie Ferris-Rotman and Ron Popeski)

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