OSLO, Oct 10: Afghanistan’s president or US disarmament experts might win the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday from a bewilderingly wide field of nominees that also includes US President George W. Bush and Irish rock star Bono.

“If I’d been an outsider I think I would have had very great difficulty finding an obvious favourite,” Geir Lundestad, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, which hosts meetings of the five-member Nobel committee, told Reuters.

“The choice often seems so obvious afterwards,” he said.

Committee chairman Gunnar Berge will announce the winner of the one million dollars prize at 0900 GMT on Friday from a record field of 156 candidates after a year overshadowed by the Sept 11 attacks in the United States.

“This year’s Peace Prize could go to such different people as George W. Bush, Pope John Paul and (Cuban President) Fidel Castro,” conservative Norwegian daily Aftenposten said on Thursday.

The United Nations and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan won the 2001 prize as widely predicted in the 100th year of the first award.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, former US President Jimmy Carter and Orthodox Christian leader Patriarch Bartholomew are among candidates also including Chinese dissidents and Bono.

Lundestad says he does not even leak the name of the winner to his wife.

Stein Toennesson, head of Oslo’s Peace Research Institute, tipsUS Republican senator Richard Lugar and former Democratic senator Sam Nunn to win for efforts to dismantle nuclear and chemical weapons left by the Soviet Union’s collapse.—Reuters