Taliban cuts off fingers of 11 Afghan voters

Taliban militants cut off the fingers of eleven Afghan male voters on Saturday to send out a chilling message to the rest of the populace that they should not have voted in the presidential elections that have been held in two phases on April 5 and June 14.

The incident took place in Herat's Robat Singi District. The injured men were attended to at a local hospital and were seen with bandages and dressings on their bloodied hands before going for their operations to refix their fingers.

All of them said that they were in no doubt that the Taliban had done this to them.

On Saturday, Afghans took part in the second round of the presidential poll in which former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah and former World Bank economist Ashraf Ghani are pitted against each other.

Incumbent president Hamid Karzai is barred from occupying the office for a third consecutive term as per the Afghanistan Constitution.

Afghanistan cuurently faces a host of problems, including the Taliban insurgency, a weak economy, corruption, and the inevitable possibility of foreign troops leaving the country by the end of 2014.

In the first run-off held on April 5, none of the eight presidential candidates, including Abdullah and Ghani, could muster the required 50 percent of the votes to occupy the august office of president aftyer Karzai.

Voting began at 7 a.m. on Saturday and concluded at around 4 p.m. in the evening. Chief Election Commissioner Ahmad Yousuf Nuristani said around seven million people had exercised their right to vote, which was roughly the same as in the first round of voting in April.

"The estimated numbers of the participants in today's election were more than seven million, which includes 38 percent of women and 62 percent of men turned out," he said.