A group of twelve women candidates who launched a three-month sit-in camp to protest what they called fraud and corruption in last year’s parliamentary elections, said police “blackmailed” them to make public their photos after they confiscated their cells phones following a brawl on Wednesday evening.

A number of journalists were “mistreated” and “beaten up” by police when they were reporting on security forces’ raid on an Afghan-Turk school in downtown Kabul on Friday morning.