KABUL (AFP) - The deadline for complaints about the conduct of Afghanistan's landmark presidential elections was extended until late Thursday, electoral officials said, leaving it unclear when vote counting would begin.
The deadline extension was announced by former Canadian diplomat Craig Jenness, a member of the three-person panel of experts appointed by the UN to look into protests about the vote.
"We decided to allow candidates an additional 48 hours" until 6:00 pm local time (1330 GMT) on October 14 to lodge complaints, he told a news conference.
However, he said any complaints which would delay the count because ballot boxes would need to be isolated had to have arrived by 6:00pm Tuesday.
A total of 43 complaints of irregularities had been filed by the end of the first deadline Tuesday by candidates including US-backed President Hamid Karzai, who is widely expected to win.
One of the main protests on election day was that indelible ink used to mark the fingers of those who had voted could be washed off but there were also complaints about early closure and late opening of polling stations and misbehaviour of electoral staff.
Officials had said the green light for the counting of votes could be given Wednesday but no firm time was set at the news conference held by the panel and the UN-Afghan Joint Electoral Management Body.
Afghan staff employed to count votes had already left for home late Wednesday so the earliest counting could begin would be Thursday.
The formation of the international panel averted a crisis hanging over the shattered central Asian state's first exercise in democracy, and major candidates have said they will accept the results of the inquiry.
The commander of US-led forces in Afghanistan, meanwhile, joined in the chorus of worldwide praise for the huge voter turnout and the absence of feared Taliban attacks.
Afghan voters who turned out in their millions "delivered a resounding defeat to the terrorists who had sought to deny them their rightful future and that message has been heard around the world," Lieutenant General David Barno told a news conference.
"The overwhelming success of this election is a strategic defeat for Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and is a turning point for Afghanistan and the Afghan people," he said.
Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda and militants of the Taliban regime, ousted by the US-led invasion in 2001 after the September 11 terror attacks, had vowed to disrupt the poll.
Bin Laden, whose presence in Afghanistan was the reason for the US-led onslaught, is assumed to be alive but his whereabouts are unknown, Barno said.
"We have no evidence to suggest that Osama Bin Laden is dead so we have to assume based on that he still is alive.
"And we don't know where he is so we can't speculate that he may be in Afghanistan or Pakistan or where he could be because we don't have any pinpoint information about his whereabouts or he would be in our custody."
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said the Afghan vote showed that democracy was possible in Iraq, invaded by the US some 18 months after the invasion of Afghanistan.
"The people of Afghanistan showed us over the weekend that democracy applies anywhere in the world where people are given the opportunity to practice it," he said.
"And I think this is illustrative of what is possible in other parts of the world, certainly illustrative of what can happen in Iraq."
With claims of irregularities disrupting an otherwise peaceful and enthusiastic election, officials are desperate to avoid similar problems during the counting process.
Afghans and international staff will count the votes by hand and will be supervised by an international counting centre manager, agents of the candidates and observers.
The votes will be tallied in batches of 10 ballot boxes and results will be made public in the counting centre before being released nationally. Final results could take several weeks.