CAIRO, Sept 8: The Egyptian authorities on Thursday rejected a request from President Hosni Mubarak’s most prominent rival for a rerun of presidential elections. With Mr Mubarak reported to have taken more than 70 per cent of the vote, Ayman Nour of the liberal Ghad Party had told the Presidential Election Commission that widespread abuses undermined the credibility of voting on Wednesday.

But a spokesman for the commission said it found that all of Mr Nour’s complaints were baseless.

“The commission checked the request and ended up rejecting the request,” spokesman Osama Atawia told a news conference. “The commission concluded that the facts referred to in the request were untrue,” he said, adding that names and numbers of polling stations were inaccurate.

The spokesman said he could not give a time for announcing the result of the elections.

President Mubarak was ahead in the count, with about 72 per cent of the votes cast, said a source in the commission without giving the turnout figure.

But in Alexandria, the number of ballots cast was 17 per cent of the voters registered and President Mubarak was the winner, another source said.

In Ismailia, the turnout was 24 per cent, with President Mubarak taking between 83 and 87 per cent in various voting districts, an election official said.

Mr Nour, a 40-year-old lawyer and member of parliament, is the best known of the nine leaders who tried to stop Mr Mubarak winning a fifth six-year term.

Mr Nour’s campaign manager Wael Nawara said: “We are surprised the committee has simply dismissed these complaints despite the coverage from the media and the repetitive nature of these complaints.”

Similar abuses were repeated across the country and not simply in one area, he said.

Mr Mubarak’s campaign spokesman Mohamed Kamal told Reuters: “In general the election was free and fair and whatever small incidents took place here or there have no significance on the overall outcome of the election.

“Any candidate who is not going to get the vote that he expected to get is probably going to attack the process. That’s my understanding of what he (Mr Nour) is doing,” he added.

Hafez Abu Seada, Secretary-General of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, told Reuters he would ask for an investigation into the violations but said they were not serious enough to throw the result into question.

He estimated the turnout at 20 to 25 per cent and said that if the official turnout figure was more than 10 per cent above that level it would indicate rigging.

Ahmed Samih, a representative of an independent group that monitored the vote, said rights groups would consider whether to complain about abuses in the courts but said any such move would be symbolic because of the election commission’s immunity.—Reuters