Aid workers kidnapped in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan – Four aid workers were kidnapped in Afghanistan as election officials ordered recounts in seven provinces after last week’s parliamentary vote, raising further concerns of misconduct and fraud during the polls.

Meanwhile, two NATO troops, whose nationalities were not announced, were killed in a bomb attack in the volatile south, the alliance said Sunday.

A British aid worker and three Afghan colleagues were ambushed as they traveled in two vehicles in northeastern Kunar province. Police fought a gunbattle with the kidnappers near the attack site before the assailants fled, Kunar police chief Khalilullah Zaiyi said.

Steven O’Connor, communications director for Development Alternatives Inc., a global consulting company based in the Washington, D.C., area, said late Sunday its employees, including a British national, were involved.

The company works on projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan.

Britain’s Foreign Office in London said it could “confirm that a British national has been abducted in Afghanistan. We are working closely with all the relevant local authorities.”

President Hamid Karzai’s administration is struggling to win public support amid widespread perceptions it is inept and corrupt.

The increasingly messy-looking election risks becoming another black mark against the government as allegations mount of misconduct and fraud. The charges – submitted by election observers and many of the 2,500 candidates vying for 249 seats in the national parliament – range from ballot-box stuffing, to people voting multiple times or using fake cards, to children voting.

A government anti-fraud elections watchdog said Sunday that it has received more than 3,500 complaints of cheating or misconduct – about 57 percent serious enough they could affect the outcome of the vote.

The election commission has released results slowly. Only seven of the country’s 34 provinces have posted even partial results and, eight days after the vote, no province has yet to announce results in full.