Five Afghans were arrested Thursday for allegedly bribing members of the country's Independent Election Commission, a deputy attorney general said.
The arrest of three people who identified themselves as election commission officials and two as money-changers came a day after the commission released the controversial final results of the Sept. 18 parliamentary elections,
Rahmatullah Nazari said.
Separately, a sixth official who works for the United Nations in what Nazari called its "election monitoring office" was being sought as the ringleader, Nazari told The New York Times.
The actions intensified pressure from the government on election officials, the Times said.
Nazari told the U.S. newspaper the unidentified suspects depicted themselves as prominent officials of the election commission but may have been go-betweens. The unidentified U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan employee was the ringleader, he said.
The alleged bribes totaled $220,000 and further arrests are expected, Nazari told the Times.
He did not say whether any charges had been brought against two other election officials who Attorney General Mohammad Ishaq Aloko said he was
considering charging with defaming Afghanistan because of public statements they had made about the conduct of the elections.
The two officials, Noor Mohammed Noor of the election commission and Ahmed Zia Rafat of the Electoral Complaints Commission, are their organizations' official spokesmen.