Abdullah rejects Afghan poll audit

Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah will reject the results of a UN-supervised audit of the election, his spokesman said yesterday, tipping the country deeper into crisis a week before the scheduled inauguration.

Fears grew of a violent backlash to the eventual result after Abdullah withdrew his observers from the audit earlier yesterday in the latest twist of a prolonged dispute over allegations of massive fraud in the June 14 election.

The United Nations moved rapidly to try to save Afghanistan's first democratic transfer of power by asking Ashraf Ghani, the other presidential candidate, to also remove his observers from the vote-checking process.

The stand-off between Abdullah, a former anti-Taliban resistance fighter, and Ghani, an ex-World Bank economist, has threatened to revive ethnic unrest as US-led Nato combat troops prepare to exit by the end of this year.

"We will be out of the process, and any kind of result from the process will not be acceptable for Dr Abdullah," Muslim Saadat, one of his spokesmen, told AFP after Abdullah's observers did not attend the audit on Wednesday.

Abdullah claims he was cheated out of victory in the 2009 presidential election against incumbent President Hamid Karzai and says history is repeating itself via massive ballot-rigging in favour of Ghani, whose camp denies the charge.

Abdullah won the first-round election in April out of a field of eight candidates, but preliminary results from the June run-off showed that he was far behind Ghani.

UN deputy mission chief Nicholas Haysom described Abdullah's withdrawal as "regrettable".

Any street protests by Abdullah supporters could set off a spiral of instability that the UN fears would revive the divisions of the 1990s civil war.

Many of Ghani's supporters are Pashtuns in the south and east, while Abdullah's loyalists are Tajiks and other northern groups.