KABUL, Oct 12 (AFP) - Three opposition candidates lodged complaints Tuesday of irregularities in Afghanistan's milestone election as ballots from 5,000 polling stations piled up waiting to be counted.
A UN-appointed three-person panel is examining allegations of multiple voting after the embarrassing discovery that indelible ink used to mark the fingers of those who had voted could be washed off.
"Two of (the panel appointees) are in Kabul already and they are working already," UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva told a news briefing.
Yunus Qanooni, the chief challenger to President Hamid Karzai, ethnic Hazara warlord Mohammed Mohaqeq, and Ghulam Farooq Nijrabi have submitted complaints, election commission spokesman Sultan Baheen said.
The formation of the panel averted a crisis hanging over the shattered central Asian state's jubilant first exercise in democracy, after 14 opposition candidates boycotted and demanded a fresh election on charges of fraud.
In a breakthrough Monday Qanooni withdrew his boycott threat and said he would accept the international inquiry's findings.
Meanwhile stuffed ballot boxes trickled in from remote corners of the rugged land by helicopter and donkey to eight counting centres, adding to the growing pile of uncounted ballots.
The count has been put on hold while the panel carries out investigations.
"There are counting papers piling up and they are ready to be counted. We are just waiting for the green light," said David Avery, the election commission's chief of operations
The count could start before the end of the week, Avery said, expecting it to go ahead "in the next day or two."
The boycott calls tainted an otherwise joyous day as millions of Afghan men and women flocked to polling stations for their first-ever say in choosing their leader, three years after the repressive Islamic Taliban regime was ousted by US-led forces.
The huge turnout was seen as a defeat of the hardline Taliban, whose bitter loyalists had pledged to sabotage the election with violent attacks and ordered Afghans to boycott.
"I think the Taliban have lost popular support and the Afghan people have spoken," said Colonel Dick Pedersen, commander of US-led forces in southern Afghanistan where the Taliban's traditional heartlands lie.
But a spokesman for the militia -- who have killed hundreds of Afghans this year -- said they had refrained from carrying out their threats because they did not want to kill Muslims.
"In order to avoid bloodshed of innocent Muslims we did not target the polling stations," spokesman Abdul Latif Hakim told AFP by satellite phone from an undisclosed location.
He denied that the failure to derail the polls meant the militants were a spent force.
"The Taliban are organized and are getting more organized every day... We will continue our jihad and elections are not going to stop us."
Eight policemen and three civilians were killed in landmine attacks in Kandahar over the days surrounding the election, but there were no major attacks on polling sites.
Candidates who demanded the election be scrapped were seen as wreaking the sabotage which the Taliban had failed to.
But acceptance of the result by Qanooni and other candidates was important to provide legitimacy for the future government, said Vikram Parekh, senior Afghan analyst for the International Crisis Group.
If they did not, there would be a danger of military commanders blocking the drive to disarm their private militias, and failing to recognise appointments by the central government, he said.
Karzai has vowed "no horse trading" if he wins the election, but it was widely expected that Qanooni would be offered a senior position if he accepted the outcome.
Four rockets hit the Afghan capital Kabul overnight, killing a man and injuring a child, signalling that the election has not put an end to violence in this war-weary country. The Taliban claimed responsibility.