KABUL, October 24 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Afghanistan’s incumbent President Hamid Karzai’s aides and chief rival said Sunday, October 24, Karzai has technically won the country’s first presidential election.

Election officials have refused to acknowledge the victory, pending the counting of the remaining eight million votes and outcome of a probe into alleged fraud, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"We have a simple majority. This is exactly what we want," Karzai's campaign spokesman Hamid Elmi told AFP.

The latest tally of 4,219,569 votes, based on 94.4 percent of ballots counted, gave Karzai 55.3 percent of the estimated total vote.

Elmi recalled receiving a telephone call informing him that Karzai's tally had surpassed four million, the threshold set by the campaign team for securing the simple majority needed to avoid a second-round runoff.

"When I received the call, I jumped, actually, to call my relatives, all the campaign managers, our campaign offices all around the country to say 'Thank you'," he said.

Presidential aide Khaleeq Ahmad also confirmed that Karzai had the "secure majority of 50 percent plus one."

"We are very delighted that we have a secure majority now. And we will wait to celebrate until 100 percent of the vote has been counted," Ahmad told AFP.

"We will celebrate when the results are officially announced and not before that."

Karzai, a 46-year-old Pashtun, has led a US-backed interim government for nearly three years.

Presidential contender Yunus Qanooni, who only got 16.2 percent of the counted votes, acknowledged defeat.

"In order to respect the nation's will, based on the numbers announced up to now, we consider Karzai the winner in the elections and he got a simple majority," Qanooni's spokesman, Sayed Hamid Noori, told AFP.

"There were lots of cases of fraud and irregularities, which we reported. But as our candidate Mr. Qanooni has said, we shall respect the will of people even though there was fraud."

Noori said Qanooni's acceptance of the result was also an effort to head off any potential violent reaction.

"To avoid violence and to respect the national interests of the country... we would respect the results announced by the commission," he said.

Qanooni, former education minister in Karzai's interim cabinet, was the favorite of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and the hero of the ethnic Tajik minority.

United Nations spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva told reporters earlier Sunday that an official declaration of results was still "a matter of days" away and declined to set an exact date.

The last of an estimated eight million votes must be counted and a panel probing alleged fraud must submit its findings before the result and victor can be declared, he said.

Election officials have refused to acknowledge the mathematical threshold for attaining the 50-percent-plus one majority, saying that the final number of votes cast was still an estimate.

In addition, some 600 ballot boxes containing around 360,000 ballot papers are still in quarantine pending the outcome of the fraud probe.

"If Karzai had 70 percent of the vote, it would be easy to declare him the winner. But since he has only around 54 percent, you cannot do it," an election official, who could not be named, told AFP.