HERAT, Afghanistan, 10 July 2004 — Three Afghan government soldiers and four rival fighters were killed in a clash yesterday in a remote western border area, the latest violence to hit what had been a relatively stable region. Bashir Baghlani, the governor of the province of Farah, blamed Taleban guerrillas for the attack on the Borjak border post with Iran.

But another top provincial official, who did not want to be identified, said the attackers were men loyal to rivals of Baghlani and he linked the clash to a recent decision by the governor to fire some provincial officials.

It was the latest violence to hit the province, which until recently was considered one of the safer parts of Afghanistan, and shows the difficulties President Hamid Karzai faces trying to bring stability ahead of landmark elections expected later this year.

On Thursday, police in the provincial capital shot and wounded five demonstrators after supporters of Baghlani pelted police with stones in a protest responding to one against the governor the previous day.

On Wednesday, six policemen were killed in an attack in Farah province’s Chakab area which police said was a failed attempt by Taleban guerrillas to kidnap Turkish road workers.

In late June, gunmen in military uniforms killed seven police officers in an ambush in Farah’s Del Khak district. Police said that attack was the work of either the Taleban or drug traffickers. Farah province is on the border with Iran, a main smuggling route for Afghanistan’s massive narcotics output.

Meanwhile, Taleban remnants claimed responsibility for an attack on Afghans organizing upcoming elections which killed one woman, the latest in a string of violence directed against the electoral process. The woman, working as a voter registration official for the United Nations, was killed on Thursday when a vehicle carrying her and three other workers hit a landmine in eastern Nangarhar province.

“We claim responsibility for the explosion yesterday in Khogiani district of Nangarhar, the attack on the electoral vehicle,” Abdul Latif Hakimi, who says he speaks for the ousted Islamic fundamentalist regime, told AFP via satellite phone from an undisclosed location. Taleban have threatened to disrupt the presidential and parliamentary polls scheduled for autumn which will end the transitional government of and introduce democracy to the war-torn country.

In another development, some of the Afghan prisoners detained in the capital by three United States citizens who were apparently waging a private war against terror have been released, officials said yesterday.

Their captors — three Americans, along with four Afghans working as their translators — were arrested on Monday by Afghan intelligence officers in Kabul’s Kart-e-Parwan district.

The group had been holding eight “civilians” in their private jail in a house not far from the upmarket Intercontinental Hotel in west Kabul. “After we found out the men they were holding were innocent people, we released them,” Interior Ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal told AFP.