The OSCE said Friday that the election in the Central Asian country, which saw Kurmanbek Bakiyev retain his hold on power, failed to meet international balloting standards, and described it as a "disappointment."

"Sadly, this election did not show the progress we were hoping for and it again fell short of key standards Kyrgyzstan has committed to as a participating state of the OSCE," the body’s election monitoring arm said in a statement. "The conduct of election day was a disappointment."

The statement said the election in the ex-Soviet state was "marred by many problems and irregularities, including ballot box stuffing, inaccuracies in the voter lists and multiple voting.

"The process further deteriorated during the vote count and the tabulation of results, with observers evaluating this part of the process negatively in more than half of observations."

The OSCE added that bias by state-run media and the improper use of government resources had given Bakiyev an unfair advantage over his main opponent, Almazbek Atambayev of the United People's Movement.

"Fantastical" results

The Kyrgyz opposition party has also questioned the outcome of the election, alleging massive voter fraud over the margin of Bakiyev’s re-election. Bakiyev was widely expected to be voted back into office, and the election commission said that he had 87 percent of the votes with two thirds of the vote counted.

Atambayev, who won 7.3 percent of the vote, had earlier called the election "illegitimate" and withdrew his candidacy on Thursday while voting was underway. The election commission refused to withdraw his name from the list of candidates.

"Ninety percent is fantastical," his campaign manager, Bakyt Beshimov, told the news agency AFP. "It is an absolutely clear indicator: this is a fraud on the state level."

The government has rejected the allegations. The election commission spokesman, Damir Lisovsky, told reporters that the elections "occurred in an environment of calmness and amicability from the side of each candidate."

The elections, he added, could not be re-run.

Opposition protests

About 2,000 opposition supporters gathered after the polls closed on Thursday night at Atambayev's campaign headquarters on the outskirts of the capital Bishkek for a concert that was expected to turn into a protest march.

They waved white flags and shouted "down with Bakiyev" - but their planned march to the election commission headquarters largely fizzled out.

The outcome of the election is being watched closely by both Russia and the US, which both have airbases in the country. Both countries want a stable Kyrgyzstan, to prevent the spread of violence from neighboring Afghanistan and the spread of Islamist extremism to the rest of Central Asia.

dfm/mll/dpa/Reuters/AFP
Editor: Neil King