OTTAWA - A former adviser to Canada's military commander in Afghanistan is denying an Afghan interpreter's shocking claims about a prisoner transfer.
Ed Jager told a military police inquiry that translator Ahmadshah Malgarai's controversial account of a detainee handover at Kandahar Airfield isn't true.
Malgarai told a parliamentary committee last month that an officer with Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security put a pistol on a table during a transfer and told Jager to kill the prisoner rather than hand him over.
Malgarai also said the same Afghan officer made veiled threats around Jager, saying when a prisoner about to be turned over to the NDS "gets to my room, he will speak."
Jager says neither episode actually happened.
Jager worked for the Foreign Affairs Department as a political adviser to Brig.-Gen. Guy Laroche, the commander of Task Force Kandahar, from August 2007 until May 2008.
Meanwhile, the House of Commons special committee on the Afghan mission is getting set to hear from former Liberal minister Bill Graham.
Graham was foreign affairs minister from 2002 until 2004 and defence minister from 2004 until 2006.
