KABUL (NYT) — The director and deputy of the international courier service DHL in Afghanistan, both foreign men, were shot dead outside their office in central Kabul on Saturday morning. The police said the assailant was one of their security guards.

The police said the guard then shot himself. Two other Afghans were seriously wounded in the shooting, the police said.
The British Foreign Office said one Briton and one South African were killed in the attack, but did not immediately release their names, The Associated Press reported.
Gen. Ali Shah Ahmadzai, the deputy police chief of Kabul, called the shooting “an internal issue of their office.”
But other police officials did not rule out a connection to insurgents. “This was a terrorist-style attack,” Mirza Muhammad Yarmand, the chief of the criminal investigations department, said on Saturday, adding that the guard had nothing in his pockets and carried no cellphone, a precaution that suicide bombers often take.
The attack occurred less than a week after a fatal shooting on Monday of a British aid worker in western Kabul, and further raised security concerns for the thousands of foreign nationals living and working in the capital.
The shooting on Saturday took place about 11 A.M. at a busy intersection opposite the Iranian Embassy and near several other embassy compounds. The streets were clogged with heavy traffic and dozens of security officials were on duty in the area.
Zabiullah Mujahed, a spokesman for the Taliban who was reached by telephone, denied that the movement was responsible for the attack and said he did not know who was behind the shooting.
The Taliban did, however, claim responsibility for the shooting of the aid worker, Gayle Williams, 34, on Monday. The Kabul police chief, Muhammad Ayub Salangi, said he had no doubt the movement was behind her killing, although no one had been detained in connection with the attack. “It was 100 percent a terrorist attack and I am sure that Taliban were involved,” he said by telephone.
Many foreign organizations and embassies employ private security guards armed with assault rifles. Many of the employees are former guerrilla fighters from the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban faction.
The police said the guard in Saturday’s shooting, whose name was Babrak and who was newly employed, opened fire on the two foreigners as they sat in their S.U.V. just outside the entrance to the building. It was not clear if they had just arrived or were just leaving the office.
A rash of killings and kidnappings has occurred in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan recently. Security officials say the Taliban have increased their attacks to raise ransom money from kidnappings and to spread fear among the public through individual killings. They are also known to have urged members to seek positions inside Afghan and foreign institutions to work as informants.
Criminal gangs are also behind many of the kidnappings for ransom, security officials say. In the latest such abductions, two Turkish telephone engineers were kidnapped in eastern Khost Province and two Bangladeshi rural development workers were kidnapped in Ghazni Province, south of the capital, Afghan officials confirmed Saturday.
The Taliban spokesman also denied responsibility for those kidnappings.
Diplomats and Afghan officials have suggested that the sudden increase in violence is aimed at undermining the newly appointed interior minister, Hanif Atmar, who took up his post on Tuesday. Atmar is expected to introduce tough reforms to combat corruption and criminality inside the police force.