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KABUL, June 27: Taliban guerrillas kidnapped and then killed 16 people in an Afghan province after finding them with voter registration cards for the country's September elections, officials said on Sunday.
The killings on Friday night in the province of Zabul were the most serious attack yet on the elections, which the Taliban and allied militants have vowed to disrupt.
News of the violence came a day after a bomb killed two young women, one a student, working to register voters for the UN-Afghan electoral body in the eastern city of Jalalabad.
Haji Obaidullah, chief of Khas Uruzgan district in the central province of Uruzgan, said the guerrillas stopped a bus carrying 17 male civilians through the district on Friday.
They took them to Dai Chopan district of neighbouring Zabul and killed all but one, he quoted the lone survivor as saying.
"They were apparently killed because they were carrying the registration cards," he said.
A spokesman for the United Nations said he was aware of reports of the incident and these were under investigation.
Uruzgan police chief Roozi Khan said several hundred US and Afghan soldiers backed by air support were searching for the villagers' bodies and the attackers.
"We have been told that the group involved in this incident has hidden in Deh Rawud district of Uruzgan," he told Reuters.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for killing the women by bombing their bus in Jalalabad on Saturday. It said the guerrillas had warned Afghans not to become involved in elections that would only strengthen the US-backed government.
Its spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said the guerrillas had killed 19 people kidnapped in Uruzgan on Friday but none were civilians. "Six of them belonged to the elections commission and 13 were government soldiers," he said.
MORE TROOPS?: An upsurge in militant violence in the run-up to the polls has raised doubts as to whether they can be held on time, but the UN Special Representative to Afghanistan Jean Arnault said attacks like that in Jalalabad would not slow the process.
"The best way to pay tribute to the two women killed is to re-dedicate ourselves to this process," a UN spokesman quoted him as saying while visiting relatives of the victims on Sunday.
