Reuters, Kabul :
One of two candidates competing to succeed Afghan leader HamidKarzai threatened on Tuesday to pull out of a UN-supervised audit of a disputed presidential election, undermining a process meant to defuse a standoff between the contenders.
The audit is part of a US-brokered deal between presidential candidates Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, both of whom claim to have won the election designed to mark Afghanistan’s first democratic transfer of power.
“The invalidation process is just a joke and there is no intention of throwing out fraudulent votes,” Fazel Ahmad Manawi, Abdullah’s chief auditor, told reporters in Kabul. “Today, I announce that if our demands are not accepted by tomorrow morning, we will not continue with this process and any outcome will have no value to us.”
Abdullah led after a first-round vote in April but failed to secure an outright majority. He trailed behind Ghani in a June run-off, according to preliminary figures, and has since rejected the outcome, claiming widespread vote rigging.
