The main election challenger to Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has alleged Karzai engineered the resignation of a chief fraud investigator to cast doubt over the process, which could end in a runoff vote.
The election watchdog continued to sift through results on Tuesday, nearly two months after polling day and a day after Maulavi Mustafa Barakzai, one of two Afghans on the panel, resigned. Barakzai said he tendered his resignation because three foreigners on the panel - one American, one Canadian and one Dutch national - were "making all decisions on their own". The UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) is investigating allegations of massive fraud during the elections, which were held on August 20.
The commission's decision on how many votes to throw out will determine whether Karzai wins outright, or if he will have to fight a runoff against Abdullah Abdullah, his main challenger. Election rivals A deputy campaign manager for Abdullah called Barakzai's resignation a move by the Karzai campaign to call into question the validity of the fraud investigations.
Barakzai's resignation has direct connection to Karzai. It was Karzai's idea," Saleh Mohammad Registani said. "Karzai is trying to bring the work of the ECC into question." He said Barakzai was widely considered to be biased toward Karzai.
An official with Karzai's campaign rejected that the president or his supporters had exerted any influence on Barakzai. "He is totally independent," said Arasalah Jamal, the campaign's liaison to the commission. Jamal said he had been in a meeting where Barakzai had said he had not been informed of decisions on the investigation process just a few days before he quit.
Source - Al Jazeera
