He rarely gave interviews, especially after a 1991 assassination attempt by an Angolan-born Portuguese man posing as a journalist. The attacker, a convert to Islam, stabbed the former monarch several times. Zahir Shah, 77 at the time, suffered face and throat wounds.

From Rome, he could only watch as Afghanistan suffered waves of killing and destruction in the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the 1992-96 civil war and the rise and fall of the Taliban.

The former king and his circle, like many Afghans, welcomed the Taliban at first, hoping for an end to the bloodshed.

But disillusionment soon set in, and Zahir Shah began working to convene a loya jirga to forge a broad-based government.

The plan languished until after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

After the 2002 loya jirga, Zahir Shah was back in his grand downtown palace. But he said repeatedly he had no ambition to dust off the throne, insisting that he wanted only to help revive and reunify his country.

One of few Afghan leaders to command respect beyond his own ethnic group, the Pashtuns, Zahir Shah still carried a regal air in his rare public appearances. Visiting dignitaries made a point of calling on him as well as the president.

Yet he also appeared brooding and distant, not least when sat alongside Karzai to convene a constitutional loya jirga that produced a constitution declaring Afghanistan an Islamic republic - and providing no official role for the royal family after Zahir Shah's death.

The late former Queen Homaira Shah died in June 2002 in Italy of a heart attack and was buried in a special hilltop cemetery in southwest Kabul named for Zahir Shah's father.

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