[Tolo News] Three days after severing the fingers of 11 voters in western Herat...a venerable old Persian-speaking city in western Afghanistan, populated mostly by Tadjiks, which is why it's not as blood-soaked as areas controlled by Pashtuns...
province, a Taliban capo, Mullah Shir Agha, was killed in an Afghan cops operation, the Ministry of Interior (MoI) said in a statement on Monday.
The operation took place in the Robat-Sangi district, where on Saturday news broke that 11 voters had been seized by Talibs on their way home from a polling center and had their fingertips, which were stained by ink from voting, severed.
"Insurgent commander Mullah Shir Agha and one of his officers were killed in a police operation yesterday in Herat," the MoI statement read. "The pair was accused of having cut off the ink-dyed fingers of 11 voters in the western province."
According to the Interior Ministry, another turban thought to have been involved in the mutilations on Saturday was injured and taken into custody during the operation.
No police casualties were reported.
The Taliban had warned people not to participate in Saturday's vote, at pain of violent retribution. However,
a poor excuse is better than no excuse at all...
as was the case during the first round in April, millions of Afghan voters turned out at polls in defiance of the turbans' threats.
Ultiamtely, Saturday's voting process was described as relatively peaceful despite a series of Taliban attacks that officials said killed more than 50 people.
Both runoff candidates Abdullah Abdullah
... the former foreign minister of the Northern Alliance government, advisor to Masood, and candidate for president against Karzai. Dr. Abdullah was born in Kabul and is half Tadjik and half Pashtun...
and Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai have pledged, if elected, to improve ties with the West and sign the stalled Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA), which would allow nearly 10,000 U.S. troops to remain in Afghanistan post-2014 to help train and advise Afghan forces as well as conduct counterrorism operations.