Final result of Afghan presidential poll on Aug 24

The final result of the Afghan presidential election will be announced Aug 24, Election Commission chairman Ahmad Yusuf Nuristan said here Wednesday.

The preliminary results of the presidential polls will be announced July 7, Xinhua cited Nuristan as saying in a press conference.

Afghanistan's presidential election was held April 5 wherein eight candidates contested to secure the country's top slot for the next five years.

Since no contender secured more than 50 percent of the votes required to become the president, a runoff election was held between front-runners Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai June 14.

However, Abdullah who secured 45 percent of some 7 million votes in the first round of the race has accused the Election Commission of siding with Ahmadzai, who bagged 31.6 percent of the votes.

Abdullah has warned that no decision of the Election Commission is acceptable unless the clean votes are filtered from the fake ones.

The Election Commission was supposed to announce the partial result of the runoff votes last week but postponed it in the wake of Abdullah's warning.

The preliminary results of the prolonged process of runoff votes was scheduled to come out July 2 and the final result was set for July 22, but the Election Commission chairman once again delayed the announcement.

The country's outgoing President Hamid Karzai has set Aug 2 as the day for transfer of power to his successor.