KABUL (AFP) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai's running mate survived an assassination attempt when a bomb killed two people in a convoy carrying him to an election rally, a government official said.
Karzai's candidate for first vice president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was not injured in the attack in Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan province, interior ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal told AFP.
A remote-controlled mine hit the second car in the convoy just after Massoud's vehicle passed by, he said, killing two and injuring two, including the deputy provincial governor.
The blast, the latest attack in a spiral of violence, came as the United Nations mission in Afghanistan gave its approval to preparations for the presidential election on Saturday.
The UN's special representative for the troubled country, Jean Arnault, told a news conference that even with "full knowledge of the difficulties", the UN believed the vote would be successful.
"We deem the degree of freedom and fairness adequate to allow the will of the Afghan people as a whole to translate at the polls, and the next president of Afghanistan to claim to represent the nation," he said.
Front-runner and US-backed incumbent Karzai pledged to accept defeat if he is beaten.
He was speaking to a crowd of several thousand people at Kabul football stadium, notorious in the past as a public execution arena under the hardline Islamic Taliban regime.
The election is the first of its kind in the history of Afghanistan, which has been roiled by conflict for the past 25 years. The Soviet occupation of 1979-89 was followed by a civil war and the fight against the Taliban, who were finally toppled by a US-led invasion in late 2001.
Karzai said it was a "source of great pride that people are expressing themselves through posters and ballots not through guns and bullets".
His upbeat assessment of the election process is not shared by all. Independent analysts say violence and intimidation combine with a lack of education among voters and a shortage of independent monitors to create fertile ground for fraud.
That in turn increases the risk that the winner will not be able to claim an undisputed victory, possibly sparking further violence in a country where regional warlords hold sway outside the capital.
The threat was put into words by top warlord and presidential candidate Abdul Rashid Dostam who warned Wednesday that if he did not win the election the government would not be legitimate.
Dostam stopped short of saying he would not accept the result of the vote. But he presented himself as the true representative of the people through years of war.
"Firstly I tell you that we will win. If not, the future government without us would have no legitimacy," Dostam told a crowd of fewer than 1,000 people, mainly from his minority Uzbek ethnic group.
The role of warlords, who use militias funded by drug money to control large swathes of country outside the capital Kabul, is one of the most worrying aspects of the election, analysts say.
Human Rights Watch said in a report the warlords, ranging from some of Afghanistan's wealthiest men to local thugs, were more of a threat to the freedom of the vote than insurgents loyal to the former Taliban regime who have vowed to disrupt the election.
The US-backed Karzai is widely tipped to win. But independent analysts say weaknesses in the electoral process may make it difficult for him to claim an undisputed victory -- possibly leading to further violence in this troubled country.