Taliban claims Afghan attack

Two Britons working for a security company were killed today in an attack, claimed by the Taliban, while helping the UN prepare for landmark elections in Afghanistan.

The unnamed men became the first fatalities in a string of assaults on UN staff preparing the country for crucial polls.

The UN said the deaths would slow a drive to register 10 million Afghans for the September vote, but vowed to press on in the face of surging Taliban-led violence.

The Britons and their Afghan interpreter were killed in Nuristan province, about 100 miles east of the capital, Kabul, said their employer, Global Risk Strategies, a London based security company.

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

Taliban commander Mullah Sabir Momin said the Britons were “non-believers” and were killed because they were helping the United States.

Remnants of the Taliban’s rigid Afghan rule, which was ended by a US led war in 2001, are still launching hit and run attacks from mountain bases.

The Taliban is closely allied to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida group and it was its refusal to surrender him after the September 11 attacks that led to its downfall.

A white UN helicopter took the dead Britons bodies to Kabul today but it was unclear when they would be repatriated.

Global Risk 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.”

President Hamid Karzai condemned a “cowardly act aimed at terrorising 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 considered a stronghold of renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a top US terror suspect.

Hekmatyar, an Islamic fundamentalist and veteran of Afghanistan’s bloody civil war, has joined the Taliban in vowing to drive out foreign troops and unseat Karzai, the US-backed favourite in the election.

Farooq Wardak, the Afghan government’s top election official, said the deaths could have “very serious consequences” for the elections, by possibly deterring UN. International monitors.

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

UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said there would be “at least a delay” in voter registration in Nuristan. But he vowed the process would proceed uninterrupted elsewhere.

“It happened in a specific place,” he said. “We look at security on a case-by-case basis.”

London-based Global Risk has been surveying rural Afghanistan to help the UN decide where it is safe to open offices to register some 10 million Afghan voters.

Almost two million people in eight major cities have already signed up for the election, but the world body only began on Saturday with a two-month plan to register voters in the lawless countryside.

Nuristan is one of four provinces where insecurity has prevented that.

Wardak said he hoped that registration could still begin as planned in Nuristan on Thursday – without UN international staff.

Today’s killings were the third assault on UN election workers in as many months.