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Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004

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  Still, Karzai's closest challenger, Yunus Qanooni, refused to concede defeat, raising the risk of political instability in a country slowly emerging from a quarter-century of war.

The U.N.-sponsored electoral board quickly approved a report by a panel of experts called in to investigate allegations of cheating, spokesman Sultan Baheen said.

"At 4 o'clock it will certify the result," Baheen said. "Karzai is the winner."

The board says the U.S.-backed interim leader won 55.4 percent support in the Oct. 9 election, 39 points clear of Qanooni and enough to avoid a second round.

The three-strong panel was called in after Qanooni and other challengers claimed massive fraud in favor of Karzai and threatened to boycott the results.

In its final report released Wednesday, the panel confirmed problems including ballot stuffing and with ink used to mark people's fingers to prevent multiple voting.

But it said there was "no evidence" that the problems were widespread, or that they favored only Karzai.

"There were shortcomings," Staffan Darnolf, a Swedish election expert on the panel, said at a news conference. "But they could not have materially affected the overall result."

Qanooni's running mate, Syed Hussein Alemi Balkhi, said the report was "unacceptable" but stopped short of saying that they would reject the election result.

"We had a lot of questions, but the panel was not able to answer them," Balkhi said. "We are not satisfied with their findings."

There was no immediate reaction from the camp of Karzai, who left Kabul Wednesday to attend the funeral of the late president of the United Arab Emirates.

Karzai, who will be inaugurated in early November, has vowed to accelerate the slow rebuilding of a country shattered by war and drought with the goal of doubling the income of ordinary Afghans by 2009.

But any attempt to focus on the economy will be complicated by the challenge of confronting warlords and drug traffickers even as a stubborn insurgency grinds on.

The size of his task, and the rancor surrounding the vote, has also been highlighted by a hostage crisis involving three foreign election workers.

The abduction has been claimed by a splinter group of the Taliban, which had vowed to attack the election, but officials also suspect the involvement of militia leaders who could lose out if Karzai presses on with efforts to disarm unruly warlords.

More than 8 million Afghans cast their ballots more than three weeks ago in a show of enthusiasm for a democratic experiment on which Taliban rebels had declared war.

© 2004 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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