KABUL (AFP) - With more than half the ballots in Afghanistan's presidential election counted and outright triumph virtually assured for incumbent Hamid Karzai, attention turned to when the winner can be declared and how the losers will react.
Two high-profile opposition figures claim alleged fraud robbed them of victory, with both Karzai's chief rival and the sole woman candidate telling AFP in separate interviews that the vote was manipulated and that they would have won if it was "free and fair".
The latest vote tally at 6:00pm (1330 GMT) showed Karzai on 2,813,429 votes or 56.2 percent of the 62.2 percent of estimated total ballots counted.
He kept his wide margin ahead of rival Yunus Qanooni, his former education minister and the favourite of the powerful anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, who has 17.2 percent.
Based on the election commission's estimates of total votes cast, US-backed Karzai needs to win around 1.4 million more votes to attain the simple majority required to eliminate a second-round runoff.
"A run-off looks very, very unlikely," said a Western election expert familiar with the process.
While Karzai could reach that tally by Saturday, the winner will not be declared until next week at the earliest when all the estimated 8.16 million votes have been counted.
"There will be no final official results before all the votes are counted," a Western election observer told AFP.
Once the winner is declared, another month must pass before he is sworn in and forms his cabinet.
"If (Karzai) is the winner, he will not be sworn in before a month. There will be no announcement of the composition of the cabinet before those 30 days," a presidential palace official told AFP.
Election authorities must also determine themselves whether the poll was "valid" before declaring the victor and an inquiry into scores of alleged irregularities must submit its findings.
Fourteen opposition candidates wanted the vote scrapped and re-held over charges of fraud, mainly arising from the partial failure on election day of indelible ink designed to prevent multiple ballot casting.
They dropped their boycott call after the three-person international inquiry was launched.
The United Nations said Thursday that all 18 candidates had filed complaints, individually or as a group, to the inquiry.
"We hope that they (the panel) will be able to send their final report to the electoral commission in coming days," UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said.
The commission would not declare the final result until all the ballots have been counted and until it hears the outcome of the experts' inquiry, he added.
While Qanooni told AFP Wednesday that he would accept the election result "in the national interest" regardless of his claims of widespread fraud, other candidates have still given no commitment.
"We have accepted the panel... but whether we will accept or not the results of the election I will not comment now," Abdul Satar Sirat, 67, a candidate from the Tajik minority, told AFP.
Sirat, a former attorney general and special envoy of the former king Zahir Shah, claims to speak on behalf of the other 13 opposition candidates.
Lone female candidate Masooda Jalal, the trailblazing mother-of-three who is polling around fifth place, never joined the mass boycott call, but she has echoed the charges of fraud.
"If it was a free, fair and democratic election... I would be the winner," the 41-year-old doctor told AFP in an interview.
Jalal was non-committal on whether she would accept the inquiry's conclusion. "Let's see how transparently they are working, how realistically they are working," she said.
The ballot was the first ever chance for Afghans to choose their own leader, after enduring Taliban rule, civil war, Soviet occupation, a Communist regime, monarchies and British colonialism.
It was hailed worldwide for the massive voter turnout in the face of threats of violence by bitter Taliban loyalists.
In third and fourth place according to the latest count were Hazara military strongman Mohammed Mohaqeq and Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostam and with 10.1 percent and 10.0 percent respectively.
Results are closely following ethnic lines, with Karzai sweeping the southern and southeastern Pashtun belt and Dostam and Qanooni leading in Tajik and Uzbek-dominated areas in the north.

10-21-2004, 18h49