Egypt: Tear gas fired at crowds rioting after alleged massive vote-rigging

Riots broke out in several cities a day after the voting. In some places police fired tear gas to disperse protesters.

Egypt's opposition says the government was using the election to secure a complete monopoly over parliament and prevent dissent ahead of more significant presidential elections next year. The upcoming vote is clouded in uncertainty, because the man who has ruled Egypt for nearly three decades, President Hosni Mubarak, 82, has had health problems and underwent surgery earlier this year.

A coalition of local and international rights groups yesterday reported that the balloting was marred by widespread rigging after the government prevented monitoring. It said opposition candidate representatives and independent monitors who were supposed to be allowed to watch the voting were barred from almost all polling stations around the country, allowing officials to stuff ballot boxes.

Though official results are not due until today, opposition supporters around the country took to the streets in anger after hearing their candidates had lost.

In the southern province of Assiut, police fired tear gas at a procession of Muslim Brotherhood supporters armed with sticks who were carrying their candidate Mahmoud Helmi and chanting "Islam is the winner".

Further south, in Luxor, backers of an independent candidate set fire to cars and clashed with security forces. Five people were injured and 30 arrested.

Other protests erupted in Egypt's northern Delta region. Around 500 backers of the secular opposition Wafd party clashed with ruling party supporters in Gharbiya, and police fired into the air and shot tear gas to disperse them.

Other protesters set fire to two schools used as polling stations in Menoufiya and burned tyres outside a station south of the Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria, briefly blocking the main highway to Cairo.

In a statement, the High Election Commission dismissed reports of voting irregularities, saying that the few incidents it uncovered "did not undermine the electoral process as a whole".

The ruling party secretary-general, Safwat el-Sherif, blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for fomenting reports of fraud.

"An outlawed group of people is trying to stifle the positive results of the elections by spreading rumours about the whole process," he said, referring to the Brotherhood - however, most of the rioting was by supporters of independent candidates.

Defeating the Muslim Brotherhood appeared to be the government's main goal in the election.The group, though banned, is Egypt's strongest opposition movement and in 2005 elections stunned the government by winning a fifth of parliament's seats, its strongest showing ever.

The Brotherhood's media official, Abdel-Galil el-Sharnoubi, acknowledged that when the results are announced, his movement may end up with almost no seats. He said none of its 130 candidates have so far secured a seat, either losing to the National Democratic Party or left facing a 5 December run-off.

He said: "The elections revealed the real intention of the regime, to unilaterally take over the Egyptian political arena."

The coalition of rights groups estimated turn out on Sunday was only 10 per cent to 15 per cent, substantially less than the 25 per cent seen in 2005.

Hafez Abu Saada of the Egyptian Organisation of Human Rights said: "We are facing violations that we have not seen in the last two elections, when the stuffing of ballots boxes had stopped because judges were in the polling stations. This year we have gone back to the tradition of marking ballots."