A spokesman said on Sunday Yunus Qanuni would accept Karzai's victory despite irregularities in the October 9 election -- Afghanistan's first ever direct presidential ballot.

"We accept in the interests of the nation, because we don't want to face another crisis," Sayed Hamid Noori told Reuters when asked if Qanuni was conceding.

The move comes a day after an American woman and an Afghan girl died from wounds suffered in a Taliban suicide attack in a popular Kabul shopping street.

With under six percent of the votes left to count, incumbent Karzai remained on course to win a simple majority to avoid a run-off against the second-placed Qanuni with 16.2 percent.

"They should be finished by today and by tomorrow, probably the total boxes would have been finished and reconciled and counted," said Reginald Austin, head of the Joint Electoral Management Body's technical and logistics operations.

Several ballot boxes were set aside for an investigation into complaints of ballot-stuffing and multiple voting, but the UN spokesman said an investigative panel recommended most of them should be released for counting.

The suicide attack on Chicken Street followed a lull in militant activity over the past couple of months as US-led troops, international peacekeepers and Afghan forces stepped up security ahead of the October 9 poll.

Three Icelandic soldiers serving with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), and two other Afghan civilians were among the wounded when the attacker detonated a string of grenades strapped to his waist, according to Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Poulain, spokesman for the NATO-led mission.

A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the attack.

Witnesses said the attacker was disguised as a beggar as he roamed Chicken Street, popular with foreigners shopping for carpets, jewellery and antiques.

The street used to be a hippy hangout during the 1960s and early '70s, but today the foreigners are more likely to be aid workers and journalists here to see Afghanistan's transition to some sort of democracy.

The US embassy confirmed an American had been killed in the blast but was unable to release further details, though other media reported the dead woman was in her early twenties and worked for a translation company.

The Afghan girl was between 10 and 12 years old, according to hospital workers.

Suicide attacks are few, though there was a series in early 2003, the last of which killed four German peacekeepers and wounded 29 others in a convoy on the outskirts of Kabul.

"We want an end to the violence, and we want security and that was the main reason why we voted," Haji Nawab, a storekeeper on Chicken Street, told Reuters as shops re-opened for business, some with windows broken by the blast.

Two weeks ago, more than eight million Afghans braved Taliban threats of violence to vote in a poll they hoped would mark a beginning of the end to a quarter century of violence.

Karzai's share of the vote has slipped to 55.3 percent after holding around 60 percent for most of the time since counting began. But votes from several provinces dominated by fellow ethnic Pashtuns had still to be tallied, giving Karzai's camp confidence that the slip was a temporary blip.

Perceived as handpicked by Washington since being placed at the head of an interim government after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, Karzai was hoping for a mandate that will improve his credentials as a leader to all of Afghanistan's ethnic groups.

If Karzai is declared the official victor before the US election on November 2., US President George W. Bush is expected to take credit for his decision to send troops to Afghanistan three years ago.

US-led forces were sent to smash the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks on the United States, and to drive his Taliban protectors from power.