In this photograph taken on July 8, 2014, Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah speaks at a rally in Kabul
AFP
Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah will reject the results of a UN-supervised audit of the election, his spokesman said Wednesday, tipping the country deeper into crisis a week before the scheduled inauguration.
"We will be out of the process, and any kind of result from the process will not be acceptable for Dr Abdullah," his spokesman Muslim Saadat told AFP after Abdullah withdrew from the audit in a dispute over fraud.
The stand-off between Abdullah, a former anti-Taliban resistance fighter, and Ghani, an ex-World Bank economist, has threatened to revive ethnic unrest in Afghanistan as US-led NATO combat troops prepare to exit by the end of this year.
The United Nations moved rapidly to try to save Afghanistan's first democratic transfer of power by asking Ashraf Ghani, the other presidential candidate, also to remove his observers from the vote-checking process.
