KABUL (AFP) - Hamid Karzai`s campaign team said it was "100 percent sure" of victory in Afghanistan`s first presidential election, even though the final result cannot be declared until complaints from all candidates are investigated and the last vote is counted.
"Our victory is 100 percent assured," Karzai`s campaign spokesman Hamid Elmi told AFP on Friday.
"Right now we are working on plans on how to celebrate it."
With three-quarters of the ballot counted, the US-backed incumbent was comfortably ahead of his nearest rival Yunus Qanooni, although his margin had slimmed slightly to 36.9 percentage points from more than 40 previously.
The latest tally at 17:20 pm (1250 GMT) gave Karzai 54.4 percent or 3,314,538 of the ballots counted. Qanooni, the ethnic Tajik favourite of the powerful anti-Taliban Northern Alliance of commanders, was on 17.5 percent.
Karzai, the 46-year-old Pashtun who has led the interim administrations since December 2001, needs about 800,000 more votes to attain the simple majority of 50 percent-plus-one vote to avoid a second-round run-off.
Karzai`s tally may surpass the simple majority during the weekend but declaration of the winner is several days off.
"The only institution that can issue a final statement is the JEMB," the UN-Afghan electoral commission known as the Joint Electoral Management Body, UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said.
"They will do that by taking into account (not just) the counting, but also the results of the investigation."
A panel of three international officials is probing about 100 complaints lodged by all 18 candidates including Karzai. The three -- from Canada, Sweden and Britain -- still have to meet the candidates again early next week before drawing conclusions and submitting their findings.
They have already met local and international election observers, and visited polling centres where contested ballots have been kept in quarantine.
"Let`s hope that they will be able to send their final report to the electoral commission in the days to come," the UN spokesman said, without indicating a specific date.
Qanooni told AFP this week he would accept the result, despite alleging widespread fraud, "in the national interest."
"I have made sacrifices for the national interests of Afghanistan and I am ready to make another sacrifice," the former education minister said in an interview.
Another 285 complaints were submitted by non-candidates: voters, political party agents and observers.
Some 45 percent of the non-candidates` complaints concern the apparent failure of indelible ink, which was meant to prevent repeat voting by staining voters` fingers.
About seven percent of formal complaints alleged a shortage of polling material, five percent concerned multiple voting or under-aged voters, and four percent complained of inadequate voter education, de Almeida e Silva said.
Eight percent of complaints were "not really complaints but compliments to the (election commission) and to the electoral process itself."
An investigation unit within the election commission is investigating these 285 complaints.
The commission will decide whether the election is valid based on the findings of its own internal investigation unit and the panel.
Two warlords were in third and fourth place: Uzbek general Abdul Rashid Dostam with 11 percent, followed by military strongman Mohammad Mohaqeq of the Shiite Hazara ethnic minority with 10.2 percent.
The results are following clear ethnic lines, with Karzai sweeping the Pashtun belt in Afghanistan`s south and southeast, Dostam and Qanooni leading in the Uzbek and Tajik-dominated north, and Mohaqeq leading in the central Hazara-dominated provinces.
About eight million of 10.5 million registered voters turned out to cast ballots on October 9, according to election commission estimates.
Their participation in the war-weary country`s first exercise in democracy was seen as a defeat of the ousted Taliban, who had vowed to disrupt the polls with violence.
10/22/2004 - 15:21 GMT - AFP