Eleven Chinese Workers Shot Dead in Afghanistan

Eleven Chinese construction workers on a World Bank project were shot dead in Afghanistan yesterday - the largest number of foreigners to be killed since the end of the war with the Taliban in 2001. The killings raised fresh concerns about security for the national elections, scheduled for late September.

A group of about eight armed men entered a compound 20 miles from the city of Kunduz where the workers were sleeping in tents and opened fire. After 10 minutes, 11 men were dead and five wounded.

The men, who worked for the China Railway Shisju group, were helping to build the Kunduz-Baghlan road, a $22m (£12m) project sponsored by the World Bank. The attack caused widespread shock as the area had previously been regarded as one of the safest in the country, and is not normally associated with the Taliban.

Jean Arnault, the UN's special representative for Afghanistan, condemned the "cold-blooded attack". China's president, Hu Jintao, described it as "inhumane and brutal". Most of the men had arrived at the site the previous day.

The electoral registration sites in the province were immediately closed. The International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), which has recently opened a base in the area and which consists of Nato and other forces, moved troops to the compound yesterday.

Also yesterday, a UN anti-narcotics vehicle was hit in a bomb attack, although no one was hurt. The attack took place at Taloqan in Takhar province.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the murders of the Chinese workers. One early suspect is the Hezb-i-Islami, an organisation which has linked with the Taliban against the president, Hamid Karzai, and the election.

So far around 3.5 million people have registered to vote out of an estimated total electorate of 9.5 million, but there are fears that the increasing violence could affect registration. Some provinces have registration rates of less than 10%. A third of those registered so far are women.

Nearly 2,000 teams are operating nationally, with 918 sites open to register voters.

What alarms election officials is that soft targets are being chosen for attacks and that they are now taking place across the country rather than in the Taliban heartlands near the border with Pakistan.

At the weekend an attack was launched with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire against a convoy of Afghan and international electoral workers in Paktia, 120 miles from Kabul.

The Pentagon issued criminal charges for the first time yesterday against an Australian held at the Guantánamo Bay prison for more than two years.

David Hicks, who was detained by US forces near Kandahar in the autumn of 2001, has been charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes, attempted murder, and aiding the enemy, the Pentagon said in a statement last night. He faces trial before a special military tribunal - the first resort to such courts since the second world war.