Head of Afghan fraud probe defends ruling

KABUL (Reuters) - The head of Afghanistan's U.N.-backed fraud watchdog defended his probe into the country's disputed presidential election on Monday after President Hamid Karzai's camp criticized it as being incorrect.

Grant Kippen, interviewed by Reuters, disclosed few of the details of the findings of his Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) after it submitted a long-delayed ruling into voting irregularities in the August poll.

He made his comments before U.S. election observers Democracy International said a run-off vote was needed because the probe into election fraud had cut Karzai's tally to below 50 percent.

Kippen said was confident the inquiry had been conducted in transparent fashion.

"Everything we've done to date, we've been very clear in how we're going to approach this. We were very clear up front and we stuck to that process and procedure," he told Reuters.

"We tried to do our work in a very thorough, transparent and timely manner. ... We also met on a very regular basis with both the major campaigns so that they were very much a part of this all the way along."

Democracy International said the outcome of the investigation should result in a run-off between Karzai and his main rival, Former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah.

Officials and diplomats had earlier said the ECC's findings were expected to reduce Karzai's total to below 50 percent.

AFGHAN COMMISSION TO DECIDE

Kippen said it was now up to Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC) to use the findings to calculate whether a second-round, which will have to take place within two weeks, was now needed.

"We are not really concerned about that (second round). We did our job in terms of coming up with these co-efficients. It's now the IEC's responsibility to take that information and do the necessary adjustment ... to the final results," Kippen said.

The delay in announcing final results has left Afghanistan in political limbo and a second round would have to take place by mid-November before winter makes much of the country impassable.

Kippen said that the scale of cheating the ECC encountered during its investigation was very high.

He said that fraud was found in every province of the country and that in the categories the ECC looked at the "degree of fraud was above 50 percent and in some cases it was above 90 percent."

But he said he could give no overall percentage or proportion of the number of votes disqualified because the data compiled by the ECC listed disqualified polling stations by category.

"I can't give you an overall number ... we're process-driven as opposed to outcome-driven, so we just don't know what the number is," Kippen said.

The IEC was not immediately available for comment. According to Afghanistan's constitution, it is required to accept the ECC's instructions and make the changes to the final results.

(Reporting by Golnar Motevalli; Editing by Ron Popeski)