...an Afghan province populated mostly by Pashtuns, adjacent to Injun country in Pak Balochistan...
province.
The incident has taken place in the office of Abdul Jabar Qahraman and as a result a number of people have been killed or maimed.
A police source confirms that the parliamentary candidate Abdul Jabar Qahraman has lost his life in the kaboom which was triggered by an bomb planted in his office.
Provincial governor’s front man Omar Zwak had earlier said at least eight people have sustained injuries in the kaboom, including parliamentary candidate Abdul Jabar Qahraman.
This comes as parliamentary candidate Saleh Mohammad had earlier lost his life in a suicide kaboom.
| An Nahar adds: |
The Taliban
...the Pashtun equivalent of men...
quickly grabbed credit for the attack, which takes the number of candidates killed so far during the campaign season to at least 10.
Jabar Qahraman had been meeting with supporters in his campaign office in the southern province of Helmand -- a Taliban stronghold -- when the attack happened, provincial governor front man Omar Zhwak told AFP.
Another seven people were maimed in the blast in the quiet provincial capital Lashkar Gah.
The bomb had been hidden under Qahraman's sofa, Zhwak said.
"We have tossed in the slammer
Drop the heater, Studs, or you're hist'try!
several people in connection with the blast," he added.
Provincial police front man Salam Afghan confirmed the kaboom had killed one person and maimed at least two.
Most of the 10 candidates who have died in the lead-up to the election were murdered in assassinations.
Qahraman was the second candidate killed in Lashkar Gah this month, after Saleh Mohammad Asikzai was among eight people killed in a suicide kaboom last week.
That incident came a day after the Taliban warned candidates to withdraw from the parliamentary election, which the group has vowed to attack.
Poll-related violence has increased ahead of the long-delayed vote, with hundreds of people killed or maimed in attacks across the country.
Qahraman, a former army general under the Communist regime in the 1980s, had long been in the Taliban's crosshairs.
President Ashraf Ghani
...former chancellor of Kabul University, now president of Afghanistan. Before returning to Afghanistan in 2002 he was a scholar of political science and anthropology. He worked at the World Bank working on international development assistance. As Finance Minister of Afghanistan between July 2002 and December 2004, he led Afghanistan's attempted economic recovery until the Karzais stole all the money. ..sent Qahraman, a sitting MP, to Helmand as his special envoy in 2016 to help defeat the krazed killer group. Qahraman later resigned.
Preparations for the ballot have been a shambles and with days to go, organisers are still struggling to distribute voting materials to more than 5,000 polling centres.
The election for parliament's lower house is seen as a dry run for the presidential vote scheduled for April and organisers have said it would not be delayed any further.
It also is seen as a key milestone ahead of a UN meeting in Geneva in November, where Afghanistan will be under pressure to show progress on "democratic processes".
Almost nine million people have registered to vote, but observers expect far fewer to turn out due to the threat of krazed killer attacks and expectations of widespread fraud.
More than 50,000 members of Afghanistan's already overstretched security forces are being deployed to protect polling centres on election day.