Facts Elusive in Kabul Death of Swedish Reporter --- KABUL, Afghanistan — With few facts emerging about why a Swedish journalist was gunned down on a crowded street here last week, some Afghan officials have begun offering an unsupported, if not familiar, theory: A spy war involving Western intelligence agents was to blame, rather than some homegrown cause. -- No officials who offered the theory wanted their names attached to it, and none could say what countries might have been involved in the killing of Nils Horner, 51, a reporter for Swedish Radio. But it opened a new front for speculation in a case swamped with conjecture. --- The biggest break so far in the investigation is video of a suspected gunman and an accomplice running from the scene of the crime. The video was captured by a surveillance camera that was mounted near the street by a Western embassy and not by the Afghan government, Afghan and foreign diplomats said. -- Afghan officials now have the video, but have refused to release it. A copy was obtained by the Expressen newspaper of Sweden and posted on its website. The grainy black-and-white video, which Afghan and Western officials said was authentic, shows a pair of men — one in traditional dress, the other in what appears to be a track suit — running down a main street in Kabul’s diplomatic enclave. -- The video was taken moments after the shooting, around the time the area had been cordoned off by heavily armed police officers to secure a route for a motorcade carrying senior officials to Mr. Fahim’s burial. The suspects ran toward the cordon and, judging from the video, most likely dashed past several police checkpoints as they escaped onto a narrow side street. -- Apart from the video, “the facts are thin,” said a European diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid upsetting Afghan officials. “We’re all struggling to explain this.” -- Now, some are saying Mr. Horner may have been killed as part of some shadowy intelligence war in Afghanistan waged by foreigners. -- The narrative that foreign forces mostly are to blame for Afghanistan’s ills has been a mainstay for President Hamid Karzai and other Afghan officials. Amid growing nationalism and anxiety about what will happen after Western combat troops leave Afghanistan by year’s end — and a long history of foreign meddling and proxy wars in the country — it may be no surprise that the theory of foreign involvement in the death of Mr. Horner surfaced. Western officials have insisted that Mr. Horner, who was killed Tuesday by a single shot to the head as he stood on a street, was not a spy. -- The European diplomat described the claim that Mr. Horner was an intelligence agent as “delusional nonsense.” -- “We’re all tired of people thinking that the Great Game is being played out here every day,” the diplomat said. - More, MATTHEW ROSENBERG, NYTimes, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/asia/facts-elusive-in-kabul-death-of-swedish-reporter.html?ref=afghanistan&_r=0