Taliban fighters killed eight election commission employees on Saturday night inside a district centre in Afghanistan's southern province of Kandahar, officials said.
The employees of the Independent Election Commission were stationed at the government office in Maruf district to register voters when fighters of the hard line group launched an attack.
The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman said the fighters killed election commission employees and 57 members of the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF). They also captured 11 others with five vehicles and a large cache of weapons during the attack at the district centre.
But Afghan government officials said the Taliban had exaggerated the casualty figures.
Qaseem Azad, a secretary of the Kandahar police said ANDSF suffered some casualties, but provided no further details.
Fighting between the Taliban and Afghan forces has intensified even as leaders of the Taliban and US officials hold peace talks in Qatar to end 18 years of war in Afghanistan.
The latest round of peace talks between the US and the Taliban began on Saturday and were, another Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said, ‘critical’.
Shaheen said the both sides are looking for “tangible results” as they try to hammer out the fine print of agreements that will see the eventual withdrawal of over 20,000 US and Nato troops from Afghanistan, and end America’s longest-running war.
The agreements are also expected to provide guarantees that Afghanistan will not again harbour terrorists to carry out attacks worldwide.
“Getting a comprehensive peace agreement with the Taliban before September 1 would be nothing short of a miracle,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Programme at the US-based Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars
Separately on Saturday, Taliban fighters killed eight Afghan soldiers and injured eight others at a military checkpoint in Balabulak district in the western province of Farah, a local official said.
Mahmood Naemi, the deputy chief of the council in Farah, said on Sunday ground clashes between the warring sides ended after Afghan forces launched air strikes.
"Many Taliban fighters were killed in the air strike," said Naemi.