Ambassador to Afganistan Math blunder

This morning on NPR the US Ambassador to Afganistan was interviewed. He was asked several questions regarding the elections, one of which had to do with the fact that several candidates have been killed. His response: "Six out of 6000 candidates have been killed. That's .001%, a very small number."
Maybe it was just a mistake. Maybe he doesn't know decimals from percents. Or maybe it was a deliberate attempt to make a small problem seem even smaller.