higher levels in their government are basically cutting them off until the investigation can be completed and they can ensure it's not going to continue to happen," he said. When they heard about the cut-off, marines responsible for training Afghan police units scrambled to fill the gap with Nato fuel. Officially they had stopped providing diesel months earlier, hoping to force the police to strengthen their own supply, but too much was at stake. "You can't just turn off fuel," said Lieutenant Shane Vickers, a logistics expert on the police training team in the district, who asked for a month's supply. "They can't go out on patrol if they don't have any fuel. They can't run their generators, they don't have power," he said. Both the provincial police chief and his top logistics officer confirmed that supplies to Helmand had been temporarily halted, although they denied corruption concerns played any role. Police chief Colonel Abdul Nabi Elham said the cut-off was due to teething problems with new Nato procedures for fuel truck drivers and a new system to calculate fuel allocations, both of which had been resolved. Logistics chief Colonel Torjan said fuel supplies had dried up two months ago and police had been buying diesel with government funds from ordinary gas stations. The stoppage was because Nato worried about the size of the bills. "There is a lot of spending on fuel, that's the reason," he told the Guardian . "They [Nato] said: 'you are using a lot of