Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah has pulled out of the UN-supervised audit of votes cast in the country's June 14 runoff, casting the disputed election deeper into disarray and clouding the chances for a swift resolution.
Abdullah's deputy campaign manager Muhammadullah Haidari told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan on August 27 that Abdullah's team would return to the process if their demands are met, but would not accept any decision made in their absence.
Another senior member of Abdullah's campaign team had called the audit process a "joke", saying on August 26 that the candidate's demands over how fraudulent votes should be discarded had been ignored.
The complicated audit of the 8 million votes has been underway in Kabul for weeks. It is meant to help determine who won the runoff, in which both Abdullah and his rival, Ashraf Ghani, claimed victory amid allegations of massive electoral fraud.
A spokesman for the United Nations office in Kabul said the recount will continue without Abdullah's representatives, but confirmed there had been "temporary disruption" in the process. He declined to elaborate.
Violence Concerns
Ghani's campaign expressed "regret" over the boycott.
His team said its representatives were told to temporarily suspend their participation in the audit after Abdallah's side didn't show up for the audit process on August 27.
"UN officials asked us to the leave so they could continue the process in the presence of international and domestic observers," Dawood Sultanzai, a member of Ghani's campaign, told reporters in Kabul.
Sultanzai said Ghani's team demands "the audit process take place intensely, and the election results should be announced as soon as possible."
Abdullah's boycott raises the prospect that his supporters may reject the final official result and seems to increase the likelihood of political violence in the conflict-torn country, where government and NATO-led forces are fighting Taliban insurgents.
Abdullah, a former foreign minister, won the most votes out of a field of eight candidates in the first round of the election in April.
However, the preliminary results from the runoff showed that he was far behind Ghani, a former finance minister.
President Hamid Karzai's office said Karzai met with Abdullah and Ghani late on August 26.
The statement said they discussed the election process but gave no further details.
Karzai has said his successor must be sworn in on September 2 as scheduled.
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