Ivory Coast misses poll deadline

Results in Ivory Coast’s presidential poll have been further delayed, a day after a supporter of President Laurent Gbagbo tore up the first announcements.

Journalist were barred from entering the election commission office on Wednesday – the legal deadline for a winner to be announced.

Supporters of Alassane Ouattara have accused the president of trying to block the result because he has lost.

The election is supposed to reunify the country divided since a 2002 civil war.

But as tension mounts, the president has extended a curfew until Saturday.

The presidential camp says there was widespread fraud in the north – an area that voted massively for Mr Ouattara in the first round and which remains under the control of former rebels.

But this is not backed up by the main international observer missions.

“The second round of the election took place, I would say, in a generally democratic climate,” UN spokesman in Ivory Coast Hamadoun Toure told the BBC.

Both former colonial power France and the US have urged the Ivorian authorities to announce the results of Sunday’s run-off.

The BBC’s John James in the main city Abidjan says the drama at the electoral commission on Tuesday evening illustrates the tension in the country, as rumours circulate alongside unofficial results from Ivory Coast’s first presidential election in a decade.

Damana Adia Pickass, who represents the president in the commission, said there had been an “electoral hold-up”, as he seized the result papers and tore them up.

Banks have been closed and the streets in the commercial district were almost entirely deserted on Wednesday, our reporter says.

Ivorians have stayed at home as repeated promises from the independent electoral commission to publish the results have been broken, he says.

One reliable source told the BBC the officials of the electoral commission have agreed on results from 13 of Ivory Coast’s 19 regions, but that the remaining regions are being contested.

The head of the UN’s peacekeeping mission, Young-jin Choi, is continuing to shuttle between the various camps and election commission to try to get the results published.

Mr Toure said the UN was disappointed that promises to publish the results quickly in the second round have been broken.

“Whoever wins, wins, whoever loses, loses – that’s democracy. They should only resort to democratic means to settle disputes,” he told the BBC.

Mr Ouattara told reporters on Wednesday afternoon the uncertainty over the results was worrying.

“It is imperative that the president of the electoral commission proclaims the results,” he said.

Earlier, French Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie told French radio that “the results must be published today [Wednesday]”.

She also said that French forces would be able to intervene if French nationals or interests were affected.

France retains close economic ties to its former colony but Mr Gbagbo’s supporters have previously accused France of bias and French targets in the country have been attacked.

Our reporter points out that the UN peacekeeping mission has copies of the results from all the polling centres and will be able to verify if what is published by the commission corresponds to 20,000 individual results.

The result is expected to be extremely close – testament to the fact these are the first open democratic elections the country has seen in 50 years since independence.

The two candidates represent the two sides of the north-south divide that exists religiously, culturally and administratively, with the northern half still controlled in part by the New Forces soldiers who took part in the 2002 rebellion, our reporter says.

The elections have been cancelled six times in the past five years.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.