Afghan probe begins in attack on AP journalists --- KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan central government authorities on Wednesday began questioning the police commander who killed an Associated Press photographer and wounded an AP reporter, a day after he was transferred by helicopter to the capital — a rare case in which an Afghan officer or soldier who shot a foreigner was captured alive. -- Local security officials who spoke with the suspect after he was first detained said he seemed a calm, pious man who may have come under the influence of Islamic extremists calling for vengeance against foreigners over drone strikes. Witness and official accounts so far have suggested the shooting was not planned. -- But the Afghan Interior Ministry, which is overseeing the investigation, told the AP it won't speculate about a motive so early in its probe into the attack, which killed AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus and seriously wounded senior correspondent Kathy Gannon. --- The suspect, identified as a unit commander named Naqibullah, surrendered immediately after the attack Friday in front of dozens of security forces and election workers on a heavily guarded government compound in eastern Afghanistan. The shooting was the first known case of a security insider attacking journalists in Afghanistan, part of a surge in violence targeting foreigners. --- Niedringhaus and Gannon were traveling in their own car with an AP freelancer and a translator in a convoy of workers transporting election materials from Khost, the capital of the province of the same name on the border with Pakistan, to the outlying district of Tani. -- The convoy went first to the district government's headquarters. The two foreign correspondents spoke to and photographed Afghan policemen and soldiers in the area, witnesses said, but it started to rain and they were worried about their equipment so they got back into the backseat of their car to wait for the convoy to move to deliver ballots to a nearby village. -- The shooter, who was wearing his police uniform, approached the car and stuck the barrel of the AK-47 in the backseat window, shouted "God is great!" and started firing, according to the witnesses and officials. --- "The good thing is that he is alive in this case because usually in these kinds of incidents the shooter either is killed or he escapes from the scene," Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said Wednesday in an interview, referring to attacks by Afghan police or soldiers on foreigners. "But this time our police acted professionally and he was immediately arrested." - More, AMIR SHAH and KIM GAMEL, Huffpost, at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20140410/as-afghanistan-shooting-investigation/?utm_hp_ref=world&ir=world