Kabul, Afghanistan ? Hamid Karzai clinched a majority of the votes cast in Afghanistan’s first presidential election, near-complete results showed Sunday, leaving him all but certain of becoming his war-wrecked nation’s first democratically elected leader.

His chief rival, former Education Minister Yunus Qanooni, announced he was willing to accept the election result, but only if irregularities in the vote were acknowledged by a panel of foreign investigators.

“For the national interest and so the country does not go into crisis, we will respect the result of the election,” said Syed Hamid Noori, spokesman for Qanooni. “But we also want the fraud to be made clear.”

By Sunday evening, Karzai had received 4,240,041 votes, more than half of the estimated 8,129,935 valid votes cast in the Oct. 9 ballot, the joint U.N.-Afghan electoral board said. That means that even if all the remaining estimated votes went to other candidates, Karzai still would have more than the 50 percent necessary to avoid a runoff.

With 7,666,529 valid votes — or 94.3 percent of the total — counted, Karzai had received 55.3 percent, 39 percentage points ahead of Qanooni.

Karzai’s campaign spokesman said Sunday’s figures confirmed optimism that the interim leader would triumph when the final results are released in the next few days.

“I’m going to see his excellency this evening to see when to start the celebrations,” Hamed Elmi said. “We were up against 17 candidates, but the people were behind us. We will sleep soundly tonight.”

Karzai has served as the country’s interim leader since shortly after U.S. forces drove out the former ruling Taliban regime in late 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida terrorist training camps.

Victory would make him Afghanistan’s first popularly chosen leader after a quarter century of war and give him a five-year term in which he has pledged to raise its citizens’ low living standards.

It could also could provide a foreign policy boost to Afghanistan’s main sponsor, President Bush, in his own bid for re-election on Nov. 2.

Afghans are frustrated at the slow pace of their country’s recovery.

Karzai is trusted as a bridge to foreign backers and has rounded up strong support in the cities and among fellow Pashtuns, the country’s largest ethnic group.

But his rivals have scored big among ethnic minorities in the north and center of the country, a legacy of the ethnic and factional divides produced by years of infighting.

On Sunday, they were still looking to a panel of three foreign experts to vindicate their charges that Karzai profited from irregularities during campaigning and the vote.

The camp of a main rival — ethnic Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, currently fourth with 10.3 percent — said days ago it accepted Karzai was likely to win. But Sunday, Dostum’s running mate Chafiga Habibi alleged continuing evidence of irregularities.

“We are waiting for the result of the investigation,” she said. Candidates will meet with the expert panel Monday to decide together whether they will accept the election results, Habibi said.