KABUL, 28 June 2004 — Suspected Taleban militants kidnapped and then killed 16 people in an Afghan province after finding them with voter registration cards for the country’s September elections, officials said yesterday. The killings on Friday night in the province of Zabul were the most serious attack yet on the elections, which the Taleban and allied militants have vowed to disrupt. News of the violence came a day after a bomb killed two young women, one a student, working to register voters for the UN-Afghan electoral body in the eastern city of Jalalabad. Haji Obaidullah, chief of Khas Uruzgan district in the central province of Uruzgan, said the militants stopped a bus carrying 17 male civilians through the district on Friday. They took them to Dai Chopan district of neighboring Zabul and killed all but one, he quoted the lone survivor as saying. “They were apparently killed because they were carrying the registration cards,” he said. A spokesman for the United Nations said he was aware of reports of the incident and these were under investigation. Uruzgan police chief Roozi Khan said several hundred US and Afghan soldiers backed by air support were searching for the villagers’ bodies and the attackers. “We have been told that the group involved in this incident has hidden in Deh Rawud district of Uruzgan,” he said. The Taleban claimed responsibility for killing the women by bombing their bus in Jalalabad on Saturday. It said the militants had warned Afghans not to become involved in elections that would only strengthen the US-backed government. Its spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said the militants had killed 19 people kidnapped in Uruzgan on Friday but none were civilians. “Six of them belonged to the elections commission and 13 were government soldiers,” he said. An upsurge in violence in the run-up to the polls has raised doubts as to whether they can be held on time, but the UN Special Representative to Afghanistan Jean Arnault said attacks like that in Jalalabad would not slow the process. “The best way to pay tribute to the two women killed is to re-dedicate ourselves to this process,” a UN spokesman quoted him as saying while visiting relatives of the victims yesterday. However, UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said the attack showed the need to improve election security and repeated a call on NATO members to provide the necessary troops for this when they meet for a summit in Istanbul today. In Istanbul, NATO is to announce that its 6,400-strong peacekeeping force will take command of more reconstruction teams in the north and deploy 1,200 troops for the polls. But this will fall short of the figure of at least 5,000 extra troops the government and the United Nations say are needed, and the deployments will be to relatively secure areas, not to the south and east where militants are most active. The latest attacks are further setbacks for President Hamid Karzai’s efforts to bring peace to Afghanistan, a country US President George W. Bush has described as a role model for Iraq. Analysts say Bush has been pushing for September polls in Afghanistan so he has a foreign policy success to balance against Iraq before his own re-election bid in November. More than five million of nearly 10 million voters eligible have registered, but the process has been slowed in the south and east by militant threats and violence.
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