One in three votes cast for President Karzai in Afghanistan's presidential elections were faked, with the official body overseeing the ballot condoning the massive fraud, EU election observers said today.

Around 1.1 million votes in favour of Mr Karzai met Afghanistan's electoral fraud criteria, as well as 300,000 cast for Abdullah Abdullah, Mr Karzai's main rival. A futher 100,000 suspect votes were cast for other candidates.

The EU team accused Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission of ignoring its own rules on identifying and eliminating suspect votes, and thus of sanctioning the fraud.

If the suspect votes had been excluded, Mr Karzai's total share of the vote would fall to 47 per cent and a second round run off in the presidential election would be triggered, the observers found.

The experts chose to issue their damning assessment only hours before the IEC released the final results of the first round ballot.

“Large scale ballot stuffing has taken place at the polling station level and all those results were entered into the system, at the tally centre in Kabul, and published as good results,” said Philippe Morillon, the EU’s Chief Observer.

“We will not make the choice of who your next president is, but refuse to be complicit in any massive fraud.”

The president reacted with fury to the allegations, accusing the EU team of interference.

“Hamid Karzai’s election campaign team believes today’s announcement of the number of suspected votes by the head and deputy head of (the) EU Election Monitoring commission is partial, irresponsible and in contradiction with Afghanistan’s constitution,” said a statement issued by Mr Karzai's office.

“The role of national and international monitors is to monitor the election process and refer their findings to the Independent Election Commission and the Electoral Complaints Commission.

“We believe the only way we can have a legitimate result out of the current process is to allow the legal institutions to complete the process and refrain from interfering in their affairs."

The EU team said that more than a quarter of the 5.5 million votes counted so far should have triggered fraud alerts - easily enough to affect the outcome.

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