Afghan election commission to reveal long-awaited results Sunday: official --- (Reuters) - Afghanistan's election commission will announce long-delayed final results in the bitterly disputed presidential vote on Sunday, whether or not the rival candidates claiming victory reach a power-sharing deal, a spokesman said on Saturday. -- Two months of crisis over the election to replace President Hamid Karzai have further destabilized violence-plagued Afghanistan as foreign troops prepare to withdraw at year's end, leaving Afghan forces to fight the Taliban insurgency. -- The rival candidates - former finance minister Ashraf Ghani and ex-foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah - were meeting on Saturday. Aides said they were close to finalizing a deal but an Abdullah spokesman threatened to pull out of the talks if the poll results were released before an agreement. -- The rival candidates - former finance minister Ashraf Ghani and ex-foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah - were meeting on Saturday. Aides said they were close to finalizing a deal but an Abdullah spokesman threatened to pull out of the talks if the poll results were released before an agreement. -- The early results prompted street protests from supporters of Abdullah, who charged massive fraud and said he was the rightful winner. -- Final results have been delayed for weeks by a U.N.-monitored audit of all 8 million ballots cast in the June 14 run-off vote between Ghani and Abdullah, the top finishers of the first round in April. -- The audit was part of a deal in July brokered by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to avoid unrest that could descend into violence. -- Both Abdullah and Ghani pledged to accept the audit results and to form a unity government with the winner as president and the runner-up holding or nominating a chief executive with expanded powers. Prolonged negotiations over details of the power-sharing arrangement have so far yielded no deal. -- Election officials had expressed hope the two candidates would reach a unity government agreement before results were announced. However Independent Election Commission spokesman Noor Mohammad Noor said the body is legally bound to release results now that all technical details have been completed. -- "It is clear that tomorrow the IEC will announce the final results based on the 100 percent audit," Noor said. -- Abdullah spokesman Mujib Rahimi said, however, that if results are made public without a deal, Abdullah would walk away from a unity government "and we will be back to square one". -- The election dispute ruined hopes for a smooth democratic transition to replace Karzai, who has held power since the Taliban's hard-line Islamist government was ousted in 2001 in a U.S.-led invasion. -- It threatened to stoke ethnic tensions that had plunged Afghanistan into civil war in the 1990s. Abdullah derives much of his support from the ethnic Tajik and Hazara communities, while Ghani is widely supported by Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group. -- The crisis has also delayed ratification of a key bilateral security agreement with Washington to allow a small U.S. force to stay past the end of 2014 to continue training the Afghan military and police. - More, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/20/us-afghanistan-election-idUSKBN0HF0B020140920