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Iran rivals dispute poll victory
Both Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, and Mir Hossein Mousavi, his main election rival have claimed victory in the country’s election.
The conflicting claims came just hours after polls officially closed on Friday.
“The speculative frenzy is building up,” Teymoor Nabili, Al Jazeera’s correspondent, reporting from Tehran, said.
Mousavi called a news conference in Tehran to claim victory soon after voting came to an end.
“In line with the information we have received, I am the winner of this election by a substantial margin,” he said. “We expect to celebrate with people soon.”
Only minutes earlier, close Mousavi aide Ali Akbar Mohatshemi-Pour was reported by the AFP news agency as saying his candidate had won 65 per cent of the vote.
But IRNA, Iran’s official news agency, soon afterwards announced that Ahmadinejad had won re-election.
“Doctor Ahmadinejad, by getting a majority of the votes, has become the definite winner of the 10th presidential election,” the news agency said.
Disputed victory
According to Kamran Daneshjoo, chairman of the electoral commission at the interior ministry, after 21 million ballots were counted and 47.3 per cent of ballot boxes, Ahmadinejad had received 15,251,781 votes.
That compared to 4,628,912 for Mousavi, Daneshjoo said.The figures from the interior ministry so far give Ahmadinejad 66 per cent of the vote and Mousavi with 31 per cent.
According to the interior ministry figures, the elections two other candidates Mohsen Rezai, a former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Mehdi Karroubi, an ex-parliament speaker - came distant third and fourth with 259,456 votes and 132,935 votes respectively.
Daneshjoo did not indicate where the votes were coming from, saying only that the counting was from polling places across the country.
“Both sides are trying to outplay each other, trying to out manoeuvre each other in the media game,” Alireza Ronaghi, Al Jazeera’s Tehran correspondent, said.
Nabili said that journalists following the elections have expressed a little bit of surprise in the last hour by the speed and conviction of vote counting.
“It does seem remarkably quick,” Nabili said. “But the explanation they are giving is that the counting has been going on throughout the day. They kept a running tally.”
Latest reports show that 80 per cent of Iran’s electorate voted in today’s elections.
Ballot irregularities
Mousavi had earlier tried to pre-empt official announcements by calling a news conference at which he alleged there had been irregularities in the voting, including a shortage of ballot papers.
Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador to Iran, told Al Jazeera: “There has been fraud alleged by the losing candidates in other Iranian elections and there has been good evidence produced that [it] actually happened.
“So one can’t rule it out in this case. What is more important in the early stages is people’s perceptions. If people perceive they were robbed that will stir up political passion in what is still a volatile country.”
Preliminary results had not been expected until Saturday.
