{{Former Malian Prime Minister Ibrahim Boubacar Keita holds a comfortable lead and could win an outright first-round victory in the West African nation’s high-stakes presidential election, the minister of territorial administration said on Tuesday.}}
Keita’s rivals immediately rejected the partial results, calling for the minister, who is in charge of the elections, to resign and an international commission to be established to tally the vote, which they said must go to a second round.
Voters turned out in large numbers across Mali on Sunday, eager for a fresh start after a March 2012 coup allowed separatist and al Qaeda-linked rebels to seize the desert north last year. It took an offensive by thousands of French troops in January to scatter them into the desert and mountains.
Voting was peaceful and observer missions have praised the polls, but tensions were rising as announcement of results neared.
“There is one candidate, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, who has a wide margin compared with the other candidates,” Colonel Moussa Sinko Coulibaly, the minister of territorial administration, told journalists in the capital, Bamako.
“If maintained, (it means) there will not be a need for a second round,” he said. The results represented a third of ballots cast from constituencies across the country, he said.
reuters
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