Afghan officials look into vote rigging complaints

Candidates in the southern city of Kandahar, the stronghold of the former Taliban regime, alleged some boxes had been stuffed with ballots after polling booths closed, and that some men used women's voting cards to vote twice.

The September 18 election for a new national assembly and provincial councils was the first in Afghanistan after more than 30 years, during most of which the country was at war.

The ballot boxes were sealed until the complaints could be investigated, election official Abdul Qahir Wasifi told AFP.

"We have a number of boxes in quarantine and later on it will be known if these complaints were true or not," said Wasifi, from the Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB) that organised the poll.

One candidate in Kandahar, Abdul Nasah Himat, said a "massive number of men used the registration cards of women to double vote."

"Some JEMB employees also had numerous registration cards... and cast numerous ballots behind the walls after the closure of the polling station," said Himat, who was standing for a seat in the national assembly.

In some cases ink used to mark voters' fingers to stop them from voting twice had come off easily, he said. A similar complaint marred last year's presidential vote that elected Hamid Karzai.

A candidate for the Kandahar provincial council, Bismillah Afghan, also alleged election officials had "cast multiple votes themselves".

In the town of Spin Boldak near Kandahar thousands of women's votes were cast by male family members and "some boxes were stuffed with ballots after the voting site was officially closed," he told AFP.

Meanwhile, ten suspected militants and an Afghan soldier were killed and a US-led coalition soldier was wounded in a firefight in central Afghanistan, the US military said in a statement yesterday.

Afghan and coalition forces were patrolling Deh Rawood district in Uruzgan province on Thursday when militants opened fire with small arms, heavy machineguns, mortar rounds and rocket-prop-elled grenades, it said.