Afghan election requires a runoff

Helicopter crash kills 5 Britishers

Kabul University Vice Chancellor Mohammad Hadi Hadayati talks Saturday about John Gabel, one of two Americans identified Saturday as victims of Thursday’s attack on the grounds of a Kabul hospital.
Kabul University Vice Chancellor Mohammad Hadi Hadayati talks Saturday about John Gabel, one of two Americans identified Saturday as victims of Thursday’s attack on the grounds of a Kabul hospital.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghanistan’s presidential election is headed for a runoff after full preliminary results released Saturday showed the front-runner failed to win a majority and avoid a second round of voting.

Meanwhile, officials said a British helicopter crashed in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing five NATO troops in the single deadliest day this year for foreign forces, and a university official identified two Americans killed by an Afghan policeman at a hospital in the capital last week.

Former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah garnered 44.9 percent of the vote, followed by ex-Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai with 31.5 percent, said the election commission chairman, Ahmad Yousuf Nuristani. The candidates are vying to replace President Hamid Karzai, the only president Afghans have known since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion to topple the Taliban’s hardline Islamic regime.

“According to our findings, it seems that this election will go to the second round,” Nuristani said. “We have a tentative schedule of June 7 to start the second round.”

The preliminary results are to be finalized May 14 after investigations of fraud complaints are completed. But those investigations are unlikely to invalidate enough votes to change the outcome that points to a second round. Electoral law requires a runoff between the top two candidates if no one gets a majority of the votes.

The eventual election winner will be quickly tested as the U.S. and NATO are expected to withdraw most of their troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year. Karzai, whose relations with Washington have sharply deteriorated, was constitutionally barred from running for a third term.

Both Abdullah and Ahmadzai have promised a fresh start with the West and have vowed to move ahead with a security pact that Karzai has refused to sign. That pact would allow a small force of American soldiers to stay in the country to continue training Afghan army and police forces to fight the Taliban.

The preliminary results were from about 6.6 million valid votes counted by the election commission, Nuristani said. He said the commission had invalidated about 240,000 ballots for fraud and other irregularities, and it also is examining ballots from 444 polling stations - potentially representing more than 200,000 votes - because of fraud concerns.

Although Abdullah was the clear front-runner in the first round of voting, a runoff could involve a completely different picture as both he and Ahmadzai court the six other candidates in the race and their respective support bases.

Zalmai Rassoul, another former foreign minister who placed third with 11.5 percent of the vote, could emerge as a kingmaker, as could Abdul Rasoul Sayyaf, an influential former lawmaker and religious scholar who won 7.1 percent.

It is unclear whether Rassoul and Sayyaf could deliver the votes of their supporters, who are largely Pashtuns, the country’s largest ethnic group. But Afghan government officials said Abdullah is on the verge of forging alliances with the pair.

Ethnic divisions are important in Afghanistan, not least because of the Taliban’s largely Pashtun base. Pashtuns are believed to represent 42 percent of the population and have taken leadership of Afghanistan as a birthright since Ahmad Shah Durrani created an Afghan-based empire in 1747 that ruled much of present-day Iran, India and Pakistan.

Many moderate Pashtuns worry that a government led by Abdullah would drive more Pashtuns into supporting the insurgents. That made his expected alliances with the Pashtun candidates, Rassoul and Sherzai, critical in a second round.

If voters follow previous patterns of choosing along ethnic lines, some believe much of the Pashtun vote will coalesce around the candidate who shares their ethnicity - though many Pashtuns do not view Abdullah as one of their own because he has an ethnic Tajik mother and Pashtun father.

Still, Abdullah - who finished second to Karzai in the 2009 election - received some Pashtun support in the first round, and his experienced campaign operation may draw enough in a second round to put him over 50 percent.

Karzai has remained neutral throughout the campaign and has maintained silence on the issue since the April 5 election. Officials in the presidential palace have said he is deeply worried about Abdullah’s apparent success.HELICOPTER CRASHES

Elsewhere Saturday, a British helicopter crashed in southern Afghanistan, killing five NATO servicemen in the single deadliest day this year for foreign forces in the country, officials said.

The cause of the helicopter crash was not immediately known. Kandahar provincial police spokesman Zia Durrani said the aircraft went down in the province’s Takhta Pul district in the southeast, about 31 miles from the Pakistani border.

He said five international servicemen were killed, but he did not know what caused the crash.

The coalition said it was investigating the circumstances of the crash but that it had no reports of enemy activity in the area. The British Defense Ministry confirmed that all five of the dead were British. Maj. Gen. Richard Felton, commander of the Joint Helicopter Command, said the crash appeared to be “a tragic accident.”

A Taliban spokesman claimed in a text message to journalists Saturday that insurgents had shot down the helicopter.

“Today, the mujahedeen hit the foreign forces’ helicopter with a rocket, and 12 soldiers on board were killed,” spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi said. The insurgents frequently exaggerate death tolls and falsely have claimed responsibility for attacks in the past.

Saturday’s deaths bring to seven the number of international troops killed this month. So far this year, 23 have been killed, according to an Associated Press count, a far lower number than previous years as international troops have pulled back to allow Afghan security forces to take the lead in security operations.

Late Saturday afternoon, a suicide bomber targeting a police vehicle detonated his explosives-laden rickshaw in the eastern province of Ghazni, killing two police officers and three civilians, said provincial Deputy Police Chief Col. Asadullah Ensafi. Seven others were wounded in the attack.

AMERICANS IDENTIFIED

In Kabul, an Afghan university official identified two Americans killed by a policeman at a hospital in the capital last week. The shooting was the latest by a member of Afghanistan’s security forces against those they are supposed to protect.

The shooting happened Thursday when an Afghan police security guard opened fire on foreigners as they entered the grounds of Cure International Hospital, killing three people, including pediatrician Dr. Jerry Umanos of Chicago.

Kabul University Vice Chancellor Mohammad Hadi Hadayati identified the other two Americans killed in the attack as health clinic administrator John Gabel and his visiting father, Gary, also from the Chicago area. John Gabel’s wife, also an American, was wounded, Hadayati said.

“We have lost a great man, a great teacher, a man who was here only to serve the Afghan people,” Hadayati said of John Gabel.

John Gabel worked for the U.S.-based charity Morning Star Development and ran a health clinic at Kabul University, teaching computer science classes in his spare time, Hadayati said.

What prompted the police guard to fire on the Americans was not clear. The Interior Ministry released a statement Saturday identifying the attacker as an ordinary police officer from Kabul’s District 6 and not a member of the Afghan Public Protection Force, as was initially reported. The protection force is a separate police unit created to protect foreign compounds.

The Afghan police guard shot himself in the stomach after the attack but was saved by hospital workers and is in custody at a police hospital.

Also Saturday, a commission appointed by Karzai to investigate prisons run by U.S. and British forces in southern Afghanistan claimed to have uncovered secret prisons on two coalition bases, an allegation that could not be immediately confirmed but that was likely to further complicate relations between the Afghan government and its allies.

“We have conducted a thorough investigation and search of Kandahar Airfield and Camp Bastion and found several illegal and unlawful detention facilities run and operated by foreign military forces,” said Abdul Shakur Dadras, the panel’s chairman.

Whether the sites are secret and unlawful remains a question. Dadras offered no evidence to support his assertion, though he promised to release more details after presenting his report to Karzai. The International Security Assistance Force had little to say in response to the allegations.

“ISAF is aware of their investigative team looking into the detention facilities in Kandahar and Helmand and we are cooperating fully with the investigation on this matter,” the coalition said in a statement Saturday.

The accusations are the latest salvo in a dispute over the detention of Afghans by foreign forces. The issue reached a climax early this year, when the Afghan government released dozens of prisoners from the former U.S. prison at Bagram, people the coalition claimed had killed U.S. soldiers.

The U.S. has accused the Afghan government of using the issue to score political points. The Afghans have said the foreign coalition has unfairly imprisoned people without credible evidence and insisted that Afghanistan be in charge of managing all prisons in the country.

Information for this article was contributed by Kay Johnson, Rahim Faiez, Mirwais Khan and Jill Lawless of The Associated Press and by Rod Nordland, Azam Ahmed and Taimoor Shah of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/27/2014

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