KABUL, March 25: President Hamid Karzai has told foreign diplomats he wants to delay Afghanistan's elections until September, diplomats told AFP on Thursday.

"President Karzai called a group of ambassadors together on Wednesday afternoon. In the course of this meeting he said that it was his intention that elections would be held in September 2004," a diplomat said, requesting anonymity.

Ambassadors of the United States, Britain and the European Union were among those at the meeting. The war-ravaged country's first presidential and parliamentary elections were originally scheduled to be held in June, according to a timetable set out by the Bonn conference in December 2001 following the fall of the Taliban.

The two separate elections will be held at the same time, a government official said. "It is the government's intention to hold elections together," he told AFP, asking not to be named.

An official announcement on the date of elections will be made either just before or during a major international donor conference in Berlin next week. Karzai's US-backed administration previously maintained the elections would be held this summer, even if they did not occur by June. -AFP