Karzai win assured

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is sure of victory in his country's historic presidential poll, but the result will not be announced for a day or so until the last few ballot boxes are counted, an official said yesterday.

An independent panel investigating allegations of voter fraud met rivals of Mr Karzai, who comes from the ethnic Pashtun majority that has traditionally ruled Afghanistan. None was expected to upset the outcome of the October 9 election.

A spokesman for second-placed Yunus Qanuni said late on Sunday that the leading candidate from Afghanistan's Tajik ethnic minority will accept the result rather than risk a crisis.

Afghanistan is struggling to emerge from a quarter-century of conflict, whose latest casualties were an American woman and a young Afghan girl killed on Saturday by a Taliban suicide bomber in central Kabul.

"We accept in the interests of the nation, because we don't want to face another crisis," said Sayed Hamid Noori when asked if Mr Qanuni was conceding.

Holding nearly 56 per cent of the vote yesterday night with less than three per cent to be counted, Mr Karzai is now certain of the simple majority he needs to avoid a run-off.

Election workers had reached the tail-end of their marathon count, with just a couple of hundred ballot boxes from the remote northwest province of Badakhshan to be tallied, along with some from Afghan refugees living in Pakistan.

"With a bit of luck we'll wrap up today," said David Avery, chief of operations for the Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB). A colleague said a Tuesday finish was certain.

The JEMB will not declare a winner before reviewing the findings of a three-member investigating panel, made up of a Canadian diplomat and election experts from Britain and Sweden.