First Afghan Election Worker Dies

A doctor helping organize Afghan elections died Monday along with four other civilians when an explosion tore through their vehicle, police said. He is the first election worker to die in violence since the landmark vote.

Meanwhile, interim leader Hamid Karzai consolidated his healthy lead, with one-fifth of the votes counted from the Oct. 9 presidential ballot. Still, his chief rival claimed that only cheating had given the U.S.-backed incumbent the advantage.

The explosion hit a vehicle of the joint U.N.-Afghan electoral commission on Monday morning in Paktika, a troubled province on the Pakistani border, said election spokesman Sultan Baheen.

Election officials said it was unclear if the vehicle was deliberately targeted or had struck a mine left over from Afghanistan's many years of war.

The local police chief said the car hit a land mine laid on a main road by "the enemies of Afghanistan" — shorthand here for Taliban militants who have threatened to disrupt the elections.

The police official, Mohammed Rahim Alikhel, identified the election worker as a local physician who had helped organize the vote and was traveling to his clinic when he died.

The other victims were the doctor's nephew, his driver and two other local men, Alikhel said.

The explosion was the latest in a string of deadly incidents that have cast a cloud over the election but failed to knock it off course.

At least 12 election workers died in the run-up to the vote, and on polling day, three police officers were killed by suspected militants who shot at a convoy carrying ballot boxes in central Uruzgan.

Despite poor weather and Taliban threats of more attacks, an estimated eight million Afghans cast their ballots in a democratic experiment supposed to cement the country's re-emergence since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

With the first 1.68 million votes tallied by Monday, Karzai had captured a commanding 61.3 percent. But his closest challenger, former Education Minister Yunus Qanooni, claimed to have evidence of organized fraud in favor of Karzai.

While officials acknowledge minor problems during the vote, Karzai's opponents are alleging that boxes were stuffed with votes for Karzai in at least four provinces.

With 20.9 percent of the vote counted by Monday, Qanooni was trailing with only 18.8 percent. Ethnic Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum was third with 8.3 percent.

Election officials say they may not call the result until the winner is certain, but have also said that the tallies are unlikely to change much once 20 percent of the votes have been counted.

At a hastily called news conference, Qanooni said he believed he — not Karzai — would have been headed for the simple majority needed to avoid a run-off if the ballot had been fair.

"The newborn baby of democracy in Afghanistan has been killed in front of our nation and the international community on the first day of its life," he told reporters at his Kabul home.

Almost all of Karzai's 15 opponents have complained of cheating to a panel of three foreign experts set up to head off their threat to boycott the results.

The panel has yet to report its findings. But Baheen, the election spokesman, suggested Qanooni's accusations were groundless.

"There is no indication of what the candidates are saying, that boxes have been emptied and refilled," Baheen said. "There's nothing like that."

Few independent observers believe that Qanooni, a member of the ethnic Tajik minority, could command a country deeply fractured by years of tribal and ethnic warfare.

Karzai enjoys strong support among Afghanistan's traditional rulers, the Pashtuns, and is seen as a bridge to its international backers and a leader untainted by its bloody past.

Official results are expected by the end of October.

By Stephen Graham