Two Britons, interpreter killed in Afghan attack

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Two British election workers and their Afghan interpreter were slain Wednesday in eastern Afghanistan, the first fatalities in a string of assaults on U.N. 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 U.N. helicopter brought the bodies to Kabul on Wednesday.

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 renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a top U.S. 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 U.S.-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 U.N. observers, Wardak said.

U.N. 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 U.N. decide where it is safe to open offices to register voters.

Almost 2 million people in eight major cities already signed up for the election. Nuristan is one of four provinces where a lack of security has held up voter registration.

Wardak said Wednesday that he hoped registration could begin as planned in Nuristan today -- without U.N. international staff.

No start date has been set for Zabul, Uruzgan and Paktika, the other areas viewed as too dangerous for election work.

Wednesday's killings were the third assault on U.N. election workers in as many months.

Last month, a roadside bomb was detonated by remote control in southern Kandahar as U.N. workers passed, forcing a temporary suspension of U.N. work there. In March, U.N. officials were attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire in a government compound in southeastern Paktia province.

Karzai and the U.S. 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 U.S. military said Wednesday that 2,000 extra U.S. Marines had been sent to Uruzgan, the home province of former Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar, lifting the U.S.-led coalition to 15,500 troops.

But Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager conceded that wasn't enough to contain militants who have killed dozens of Afghan soldiers in recent weeks, pushing the overall death toll for the year past 300.

Mansager said U.S. and Afghan officials were seeking their governments' approval to recruit thousands of troops for a new Afghan force.

The new force would "help increase security and stability in a region where right now we don't have enough forces to provide that security," Mansager said.