Afghanistan’s UN-appointed election watchdog said yesterday it had found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud” in last month’s presidential election and ordered a recount of suspicious returns.
The announcement came on the same day a suicide car bomber blew up his vehicle outside a NATO military base at Kabul’s main airport killing three civilians.
The Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) said returns must be recounted and audited for any polling station where more than 600 votes were recorded — the most authorities believe should have been cast at any station — or where any candidate received more than 95 percent of the vote if more than 100 were cast.
International officials initially hailed the Aug. 20 election because Taliban fighters failed to scupper it. As fraud charges mount, however, those assessments have become more guarded.
Recent tallies have shown Afghan President Hamid Karzai just shy of the 50 percent majority needed to win in a single round without a run-off, with uncounted votes from the heartland of his support in the south appearing likely to put him over the top.
His main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, said many of those southern votes are fake, a charge given credibility by the ECC’s findings.
“In the course of its investigations, the ECC has found clear and convincing evidence of fraud in a number of polling stations,” the body said in a statement.
Most of the stations where it found fraud had either a larger than expected number of total votes cast, or a higher than expected proportion cast for a single candidate, it said.
The ECC is led by a Canadian and three of its five members were appointed by the UN. It has the power to set aside results as reported by Afghanistan’s own Independent Election Commission, which was due to release nearly complete preliminary results later yesterday.
Meanwhile, the head of criminal investigations for Kabul police, Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada, said three civilians were killed and six wounded in the airport attack. No foreign troops were killed, though four were lightly injured, NATO said.
Huge flames could be seen rising from the blast site and the wail of sirens could be heard several kilometers from the airport.
A Taliban spokesman said by telephone from an undisclosed location the militants were responsible for the blast.
Meanwhile, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) announced the start of a formal investigation into a US air strike last Friday that Afghan officials say killed scores of people, many of them civilians. The probe will be led by a Canadian general.
For the first time, the force said clearly yesterday it believed civilians had been killed.
“Subsequent review has led ISAF to believe that along with insurgents, civilians also were killed and injured in the strike,” it said.
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