KABUL — Taliban insurgents killed an Afghan election official Wednesday, and the group’s spokesman then announced the assassination on the social-networking site Twitter.
It was the first attack by the insurgents against an official of the Independent Election Commission in recent years, officials at the agency said, and apparently the first time the Taliban claimed an assassination in a Twitter message.
The deputy police chief in Kunduz province, Ebadullah Talwar, said that two gunmen riding on a motorcycle opened fire on Mohammad Amanullah, the head of the Kunduz office of the commission, at 8:45 a.m., and he died after arriving at a hospital.
Within an hour, Zabiullah Mujahid, the spokesman for the Taliban, issued a tweet in Dari boasting of the attack.
“At 9 a.m. this morning, Engineer Mohammad Aman head of Kunduz Independent Election Commission was killed by our Mujahedeen in Takharistan area of Kunduz city,” the Taliban tweet read, using a shortened version of the victim’s name.
Last March, the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, denounced the planned April 2014 elections, calling them “a waste of time, nothing more.”
However, the Taliban leader did not explicitly threaten election workers and during previous election campaigns officials with the election commission were not singled out for attack.
Officials of the commission have had far more problems from government harassment in past years, but the current panel has been criticized by opponents as being dominated by political appointees close to President Hamid Karzai. The head of the panel, Mohammad Yousef Nuristani, for instance, is a former spokesman for the president.
The insurgents’ effort to draw attention to the assassination of an election official may mean the group has decided to try to disrupt the elections more vigorously than they have in the past.
“The Taliban commit such acts to prevent our people from becoming empowered and developed, so that the foreigners can determine our destiny,” Karzai said in a statement condemning the killing. “An inclusive election will be held in this country, and the enemy’s plots against that will fail, and nothing will remain to the Taliban except denigration and disgrace.”