KABUL, Sept 16: Less than 48 hours before Afghanistan’s first parliamentary polls for a generation, Taliban rebels said on Friday they had killed another election candidate and called on Afghans not to vote.

Armed men dragged national assembly candidate Abdul Hadi from his house in Hazarjoft, a district in the restive southern province of Helmand, and gunned him down late on Thursday, provincial and election officials said.

“He is the seventh candidate to be killed since July,” the joint UN-Afghan election management team’s spokesperson Bronwyn Curran told AFP. Several of the killings have been blamed on insurgents.

The Taliban later claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that it targeted Hadi because he was taking part in Sunday’s ‘US-designed process’ and adding it had also killed the candidate’s guard. Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi warned Afghanistan’s 12.5 million voters of further violence.