Three die in Afghan attack
Britons, translator worked with UN on upcoming vote
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Two British election workers and their Afghan interpreter were slain yesterday in eastern Afghanistan, the first fatalities in a string of assaults on UN staff preparing for crucial balloting.
The United Nations said the killings would slow a drive to register some 10 million Afghans for the September vote, but officials promised to press on despite the surging Taliban-led violence.
The Britons were killed in Nuristan Province, 100 miles east of the capital, Kabul, said Global Risk Strategies, a London-based security company. The company did not identify them but said they had been working with the United Nations.
A white UN helicopter brought the bodies to Kabul yesterday.
Global Risk Strategies said "local bandits" were believed to be behind the attack, but Afghan officials said it was unclear if it was a "criminal or a terrorist incident."
"Unfortunately we have a lot of irresponsible armed people in this country," Interior Ministry spokesman Latfulla Mashal said. "We don't know who was behind it."
However, President Hamid Karzai condemned what he called a "cowardly act aimed at terrorizing the people of Afghanistan" and disrupting the election.
"Afghanistan will continue relentlessly on the path that the people of the country have chosen: the path of peace prosperity and reconstruction," his office said in a statement.
Nuristan, a rugged region of high peaks and forested valleys on the Pakistani border, has its share of bandits. But it is also a stronghold of warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a top US terror suspect.
Hekmatyar, a veteran of Afghanistan's civil war, has joined remnants of the ousted Taliban regime in promising to drive out foreign troops and unseat Karzai, the US-backed favorite in the election.
Farooq Wardak, the Afghan government's top election official, said the killings could have "very serious consequences" for the upcoming vote.
"The election wouldn't have that much international credibility" without UN observers, Wardak said.
UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said there would be "at least a delay" in voter registration in Nuristan. But he said the process would go ahead elsewhere.
"It happened in a specific place," he said. "We look at security on a case-by-case basis."
Global Risk has been surveying rural Afghanistan to help the UN decide where it is safe to open offices to register voters.
Almost 2 million people in eight major cities have already signed up to vote. Nuristan is one of four provinces where a lack of security has held up registration.
Wardak said yesterday that he hoped registration could begin as planned in Nuristan today -- without UN international staff.
No start date has been set for Zabul, Uruzgan, and Paktika provinces, the other areas viewed as too dangerous for election work.
Yesterday's killings were the third assault on UN election workers in as many months.
Last month, a roadside bomb was detonated by remote control in southern Kandahar as UN workers passed, forcing a temporary suspension of UN work there. In March, UN officials were attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire in a government compound in southeastern Paktia Province.
Karzai and the US military have insisted that logistics, not security, were the main challenge presented by the elections.
"This confirms what we've been talking about, that security is a major element in this process," Almeida e Silva said.
The US military said yesterday that 2,000 extra US Marines had been sent to Uruzgan, the home province of former Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, increasing the US-led coalition's presence to 15,500 troops.
But Lieutenant Colonel Tucker Mansager conceded that wasn't enough to contain militants who have killed dozens of Afghan soldiers in recent weeks. 