President Ghani Orders to Investigate Distribution of Fake ID Cards

President Ashraf Ghani in an order set up a delegation led by the Attorney General’s Office to investigate the fraud in distribution of national ID cards.

Ghani’s order comes after the Grand National Coalition of Afghanistan revealed thousands of “fake national ID cards with their stickers”.

President tasked the delegation to investigate the distribution process of national ID cards from the year 1396 to 1397.

In another decree, President tasked a delegation to investigate the overall campaign of distributing the paper ID cards and to specify the exact number of distributed ID cards.

In the meantime, the electoral observing and monitoring institutions expressed deep concern over the management of time in holding the upcoming election.

“We concern over the management of time. Time passes and the election commission’s tasks slowly move forward. There are no political agreements and the technical weaknesses remain in place,” Naeem Ayoub Zada, the Transparent Election Foundation of Afghanistan (TEFA) said.

However, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) has assured over the taken preparations for holding a transparent and on time election.

“We have received the samples of prepares that are under publication and some of them have been prepared due to the request of the commission,” Hafizullah Hashemi, IEC commissioner added.

The electoral observing, monitoring institutions and political parties have previously urged the Afghan government and IEC to prevent organized fraud and irregularities; otherwise the upcoming election would be unacceptable for the people.