UN condemns attack on election workers

The United Nations has expressed outrage over Friday’s fatal attack against a convoy of the Secretariat of the Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB) in central Uruzgan province, killing two JEMB national staff. "The Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG), Jean Arnault, condemns in the strongest terms this murderous attack," Manoel de Almeida e Silva, a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), said on Sunday. The SRSG conveyed his condolences and expressed his deepest sympathy to the families, friends, and colleagues of the deceased, he said, expressing the hope that another member of the convoy still not accounted for would be found alive and well. According to UNAMA, between 5:30 and 6:00 pm on Friday (6 August) local time, four vehicles of the JEMB Secretariat and the police were attacked near the village of Yakhdan in the Shahidi Hassas district of Uruzgan province. During the attack, a JEMB Secretariat training officer and a driver, were both killed and a third person, yet to be identified, was reported as missing, the UNAMA spokesman said, noting that all four vehicles had been destroyed. All voter registration sites in Uruzgan remained open, as was the case throughout the country with the exception of one in the area where the attack had taken place that was temporarily closed, he said. The UN Special Representative had been encouraged that police accompanying the convoy managed to capture one of the attackers and hoped that others would be apprehended and brought to justice soon, he added. Such kinds of attacks against election workers have become a major source of concern for both UNAMA and JEMB, while the country prepares to hold its first presidential poll this fall. "Security is a very important concern and it is also one of ours as well as the JEMB," the spokesman stressed, adding that from the beginning, and even before registration began, they had been saying that security was and continued to be an issue of concern throughout the registration period. "The killing of our two colleagues on Friday brought the number of people working with the JEMB Secretariat who have been killed to 12; 10 Afghans and two expatriates," the UN official told IRIN. More than 9.1 million Afghans have registered to vote in the upcoming elections scheduled for 9 October, of whom 58.6 percent were men and 41.4 percent were women.