A bomb killed two women working for the U.N.-Afghan electoral body and wounded nine female poll workers and two children on Saturday, in one of the worst attacks yet on preparations for the elections. The Taliban swiftly claimed responsibility for the attack, which was a further setback for President Hamid Karzai’s efforts to bring peace to a country President Bush has described as a role model for Iraq.

The blast in the eastern city of Jalalabad destroyed a bus taking the Afghan women to register female voters for the polls scheduled for September, which the Taliban and allied Islamic militants have vowed to disrupt.

“We did this because we warned people not to get involved in the election process,” Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said after contacting Reuters by telephone. “This only strengthens the foundations of the American-backed government.” He said the guerrillas had also killed two US Marines in an ambush in the eastern province of Kunar on Thursday night but had released a Turk kidnapped in March while working on a reconstruction project – partly because he was a Muslim. UN spokesman Manoel de Almeidae Silva said the Jalalabad attack was probably aimed at discouraging women from voting. He said movement of female staff was being temporarily restricted. “They will not reach their goal,” he added.

About 4.5 million of nearly 10 million eligible voters have registered, but the process has been slowed in the south and east by militant violence. Female registration has lagged, partly due to problems recruiting female workers needed to register women, given conservative Islamic values. Jalalabad police chief Mohammad Younis Noorzai said the bomb was planted inside the minibus. “It was a locally hired van and we have arrested the driver, who was also wounded,” he said.

The UN spokesman said two women were killed while three were in critical condition, along with a child who was accompanying his mother. Nine women suffered lighter injuries. UN Special Representative Jean Arnault – who this week urged NATO to urgently step up its peacekeeping presence in Afghanistan – said he was “profoundly outraged.”

The attack was the latest on the voter registration process, and an upsurge in militant violence in the run-up to the polls has raised doubts as to whether they can be held on time. It came just after Karzai appealed to NATO on Friday to honor its pledge to send more troops to protect the presidential and parliamentary vote.

At a summit in Istanbul this week, NATO is to announce that its 6 400-strong peacekeeping force will take command of more military-civilian reconstruction teams in northern Afghanistan and deploy about 1 200 troops for the polls. But this will fall short of at least 5 000 extra troops the government and the United Nations say are needed, and the deployments will be to relatively secure areas, not to the south and east where militants are most active.

Ahmad Nader Nadery of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission said the attack should be a “strong message” to NATO. “If the international community wants a peaceful transition in Afghanistan, there definitely needs to be an expansion of NATO into more insecure places,” he said.

Until Saturday, at least 33 foreign and Afghan aid workers had been killed in 18 months, severely disrupting aid and reconstruction work, as well as hampering election preparations.

Dawood WafA