The Yemeni opposition took issue on Friday with partial election results giving veteran President Ali Abdullah Saleh a sweeping victory and threatened to call its supporters onto the streets in a show of strength.
"If we do not have any other way in the absence of a neutral justice, we will take to the street and will ask the international observers to determine our true number," said Mohammad Qahtan, spokesman of the Common Forum, the opposition umbrella group that sponsored Saleh's main challenger.
But he insisted he was "not inciting violence" in a country which has one of the highest rates of private gun ownership in the world with an estimated three firearms for every one of its 20 million inhabitants.
"We will go into the streets stripped of all weapons, even the traditional dagger" carried by Yemeni men, he said.
Qahtan described as "laughable" partial results released by the electoral commission giving Saleh 80 percent of the vote to 20 percent for opposition standard-bearer Faisal bin Shamlan.
Out of 4.33 million votes cast, Saleh received nearly 3.45 million, while Bin Shamlan got nearly 885,000, electoral commission spokesman Abdo al-Janadi said, citing results reported from polling stations and candidates' representatives.
The official Saba news agency said the figures represented the results from 17,500 ballot boxes out of a total of 27,000 allocated for the election.
But "these results are not definitive," Janadi stressed.
The opposition had said ahead of Wednesday's election that it feared supporters of the incumbent, in power for 28 years, might be tempted to falsify the results.
But the head of the EU monitoring mission, British peer Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, Thursday called the election "an open and genuine political contest" and "a milestone in Yemen's political history".
Baroness Nicholson said the election - only the second presidential vote since north and south Yemen united in 1990 - "in general" met international standards.
"Generally, we saw that voting procedures were conducted very well in 82 percent of the polling stations we visited countrywide, in spite of a number of irregularities such as breaches of secrecy and underaged voting," she said.
"Our assessment is good or very good. Those were credible and peaceful elections."
Nearly 90,000 troops and police were deployed to oversee voting by 9.25 million eligible electors, 3.9 million of them women.
Five people were killed and six wounded in clashes between Saleh's supporters and opposition rivals, prompting voting to be suspended in about a dozen of the 5,620 polling stations, officials said.
The run-up to the vote had also been marred by violence, including sporadic clashes between rival supporters, the deaths of well over 50 people in stampedes at Saleh campaign rallies and a foiled attack on oil installations.
Eyeing another seven-year term, Saleh on Wednesday called the election a "real celebration of Yemen's democracy as we set the foundations for Yemen's future in (a way which allows) peaceful alternation of power."
Saleh, who first took office as leader of the then North Yemen in 1978, has survived a 1994 civil war with the former communist south and Al-Qaeda-inspired violence in Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland.
The 64-year-old head of the ruling General People's Congress was faced with his greatest electoral test in the shape of 72-year-old Bin Shamlan in a test of Washington's efforts to export democracy to the Middle East.
As voting was under way, a security official said a man with explosives in his possession had been detained in the capital on suspicion of plotting attacks on behalf of Al-Qaeda.
On the eve of polling, Saleh had also announced the arrest of an Al-Qaeda-linked "terrorist" in Bin Shamlan's entourage on suspicion of planning attacks on US interests.
But the challenger's supporters said the man detained had worked for just seven days as a bodyguard before being dismissed as a suspected government agent.
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