Afghan president names new election panel chief ahead of September parliamentary elections

Afghan president announces election panel chief

KABUL — Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced a new head for the country’s election commission on Saturday, replacing a chairman accused of ignoring fraud during last year’s presidential election.

The appointment of Fazel Ahmed Manawi, who was a member of the Independent Election Commission during last year’s vote, comes as the nation starts preparations for parliamentary elections in September.

Azizullah Lodin was the former head of the commission, which was widely criticized last year for overlooking rampant ballot-stuffing and other fraud, which a separate, U.N.-backed watchdog group uncovered.

Preparations for the vote take place against a background of continuing insurgent violence aimed at undermining the central government and its foreign backers.

Officials said two police officers were killed by a roadside bomb in eastern Afghanistan early Saturday, while an overnight gunbattle between police and the Taliban in the north left five insurgents dead.

The police officers died when their vehicle hit a bomb near Khost city, the capital of the province of the same name. Deputy provincial Gov. Tahir Khan Sabari said three other officers were wounded.

Police said a separate blast in the eastern city of Jalalabad on Saturday wounded employees of the country’s intelligence agency, but there were no deaths.

Taliban also attacked a police checkpoint Friday night in the northern province of Kunduz, a formerly calm area that has seen increasing insurgent violence over recent months. Provincial spokesman Ahmad Sami Yawar said five insurgents died in the fighting, but no police were killed.

Meanwhile, NATO said its forces captured two Taliban commanders responsible for leading insurgent attacks and making roadside bombs in separate raids on Friday in the volatile southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.

Searches also turned up stores of weapons used by the insurgents, including artillery shells, incomplete homemade bombs, land mines, ammunition, rocket propelled grenades and rifles, it said. A number of suspected Taliban fighters were detained for questioning, but no Afghans or foreign troops were killed in the operations, NATO said.

International forces also discovered a truck loaded with an estimated 500 pounds (225 kilograms) of heroin and hashish that had been set on fire in Kandahar’s major drug-producing region of Registan, NATO said. It said a truck matching the description had earlier been reported as evading a security checkpoint, although it wasn’t clear how it had been set aflame.

Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s heroin and proceeds from the drug trade are a major source of funding for the insurgency.