Afghan attack victims were British

Two Britons working for a security company have been killed in an attack while helping the UN prepare for landmark elections in Afghanistan.

Senior Afghan officials said the two and their Afghan driver were killed yesterday when they came under attack in Nuristan, a remote eastern province where the Taliban are still in evidence.

They were employees of Global Risk Strategies, a London-based security firm, said Farooq Wardak, the Afghan government’s top election official.

“Both of the individuals involved were British nationals, working alongside the United Nations,” the company said in a statement. It didn’t release their names.

The deaths were the first among Afghan and foreign staff preparing the country’s first post-Taliban election, slated for September.

Details of the attack were unclear. But the US military has warned repeatedly that Taliban-led militants were trying to derail the process in the region, about 100 miles east of the capital, Kabul, and near the Pakistan border.

Global Risks is surveying parts of rural Afghanistan as part of UN plans to register voters for September elections.

The Britons “had already visited two districts and it was the third district that they wanted to survey,” Hilal said.

Wardak said the deaths would have “very serious consequences”, by possibly deterring UN international monitors.

“The election wouldn’t have that much international credibility” in their absence, Wardak said.

The United Nations is pressing ahead with plans to register 10 million Afghan voters across the country, despite a surge in violence by Taliban-led militants.

The world body has already registered almost two million Afghans in eight major cities for the election, but only began on Saturday to sign up voters in the lawless countryside.

The world body has warned that the vote will fail if security is not improved, and has already had to suspend or delay registration work in the south and east of the country in response to several attacks.

Nuristan is one of four troubled provinces along the Pakistani border where registration was delayed because of poor security, Wardak said last week.

Last month, a roadside bomb was detonated by remote control in southern Kandahar as UN workers passed, forcing a suspension of all UN work in the region.

In March, UN officials were attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire as they slept in a government compound in south-eastern Paktia province.

Slow registration already forced President Hamid Karzai, the favourite to win the election, to postpone the vote from June to September.