Afghanistan Election: Abdullah Abdullah Demands Vote-Count Freeze Over Fraud Allegations

Afghan presidential hopeful Abdullah Abdullah has called for a halt to vote-counting in the country's landmark election following allegations of widespread fraud.

"We have asked our monitors to leave their offices," he said.

He added that "if the Election Commission continues the process of vote counting, it has no legitimacy".

Abdullah said that ballot boxes had been illegally stuffed with votes for his election rival Ashraf Ghani and he had therefore lost faith in the electoral authorities counting the votes.

"In many polling stations, the ballot boxes had been filled in the absence of our observers, in some places our observers had not been allowed to monitor and many more cases of irregularities have been detected and documented," he said at a press conference

Of the 12 million Afghans eligible to vote, 7 million turned out to cast their ballots in the face of Taliban threats to disrupt the democratic process.

Abdullah won the most votes in the first round in April, but did not secure an outright majority over the seven other candidates.

This month, Abdullah survived an assassination attempt on his convoy in western Kabul. His bodyguards were injured but he was unharmed when two bomb blasts hit his presidential rally in the Afghan capital.

The results of the election will be revealed on 2 July. Outgoing president Hamid Karzai - who is constitutionally barred from running for a third term - is set to hand power to his successor in August.