DHAKA: A recount of votes in the Afghan election has been suspended again, despite being scheduled to restart on Saturday after the Muslim Eid holiday.

The breakdown came despite late night phone talks between US Secretary of State John Kerry and candidates Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani.

A spokesman for Abdullah said that the UN had not taken his concerns into account.

Both candidates accuse each other of electoral fraud.

It was Kerry’s intervention last month in three days of talks in Kabul that led to agreement to carry out a full audit of votes.

The current dispute is over how to deal with ballot boxes found to contain invalid votes.

Abdullah wants all of the votes thrown out if some in a box are found to be invalid. But the UN would prefer to discard individual votes not whole boxes.

The head of the UN in Afghanistan, Jan Kubis, said his team wants to count as many valid votes as possible, ‘thus honouring the courage and determination of the Afghans who voted in both rounds of the presidential election’, reports the BBC.

BDST: 2003 HRS, AUG 02, 2014