Abdullah claims runoff win

At a rally of his supporters in Kabul on Tuesday, presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah (pictured above in the middle) said he rejected the results released by Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission and declared himself the winner of last month's runoff election.

"We are proud, we respect the votes of the people, we were the winner," Abdullah told thousands of supporters. "We will not accept a fraudulent result - not today, not tomorrow, never."

On Monday, the election commission announced that former World Bank economist Ashraf Ghani appeared to have won the second round of a presidential election, securing 56 percent of the vote in preliminary results.

Abdullah was said to have garnered 44 percent of the vote.

The commission has already acknowledged that vote rigging had occurred, with ballots from about 7,000 more of the nearly 23,000 polling stations to be audited. Afghan officials released the preliminary results despite an earlier warning from one-time foreign minister Abdullah that he would not accept any results until all fraudulent ballots have first been invalidated.

'Not final or authoritative'

The announcement also brought a swift and strongly-worded statement from the US State Depatment, which cautioned that the results were "not final or authoritative." It urged electoral authorities to "implement a thorough audit whether or not the two campaigns agree."

Any disagreement about the election outcome could cause tensions across the ethnic divide. Ghani - a former finance minister and - attracts much of his support from Pashtun tribes in the south and east of the country, while Abdullah's adherents tend to include more Tajiks and other northern Afghan groups.

President Hamid Karzai, who has presided over Afghanistan since the US-led invasion of the country in 2001, is constitutionally barred from a third term in office. The country's next president will be tasked with leading the country through one of its greatest tests since the invasion, with foreign forces in the country set to leave at the end of this year after 13 years of combat with the Taliban.

The Taliban remains a strong force in the country, however, and a suicide bomb attack claimed by the Taliban killed sixteen people on Tuesday.

mz/ipj (AFP, Reuters, AP)