Afghans voted in presidential elections amid tight security on Saturday, even as insurgents attacked polling centres in a series of blasts and clashes across the country that left at least one person dead.
The first-round vote marks the culmination of a bloody election campaign that despite a large field of candidates is seen as a close race between President Ashraf Ghani and his bitter rival Abdullah Abdullah, the country’s chief executive.
Wary authorities placed an uneasy Kabul under partial lockdown, flooding streets with troops and banning trucks from entering the city in an effort to stop would-be suicide bombers targeting residents as they cast their votes.
Voting was extended for two hours until 5:00pm (1230 GMT) due to long queues of people still waiting to cast their ballots, the Independent Election Commission said.
Compared to previous elections, the initial toll appeared relatively light, though Afghan national authorities were providing little information about reported blasts and ongoing armed clashes with the Taliban in various provinces.
One person was killed and two others wounded in an explosion near a polling centre in Jalalabad in the eastern province of Nangarhar, the provincial governor’s spokesman Attaullah Khogyani said.
And at least 16 people were wounded in the southern city of Kandahar when a bomb went off at a polling station, a hospital director told AFP, while officials across the country reported several small explosions at other election sites.
