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BAGHDAD, Iraq Jan
14 (AP) - A senior Iraqi election official on
Saturday said the country's electoral commission
would not be able to release final results from the
Dec. 15 elections in the coming week, likely
delaying certification of the outcome until the end
of the month.
Meanwhile, a senior official with an international
team assessing the results at the request of the
Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq said his
group would take more than a week to issue their own
final findings. There had been hopes the final
results would be released in the coming days.
"It is impossible to have the final election results
this week," Safwat Rashid, a senior member of the
IEIC, told The Associated Press. He was referring to
the Islamic week, which began Friday and ends
Thursday.
The leader of the main Sunni Arab Iraqi Accordance
Front, Adnan al-Dulaimi, said delaying the results
to accommodate the international monitoring team's
investigation was a logical decision.
"If the results were announced without the review by
the international committee, the results would not
be accurate or in accordance with the votes that
were actually cast," he said.
A group of assessors from the International Mission
for Iraqi Elections, or IMIE, arrived at the
beginning of January after Sunni Arab and Shiite
secular parties complained the elections had been
tainted by widespread fraud and intimidation. They
demanded a rerun of the elections in some provinces
including Baghdad, Iraq's largest with 59 of the
parliament's 275-seats.
Kamal al-Saadi, a senior official in Prime Minister
Ibrahim al-Jaafari's Dawa party, said he had no
problem with delaying the results another week.
He said the delay may mean that election officials
want to be "more accurate in the process," and added
that the international team assessing the results is
here so that "there would be no doubt about the
results in the minds of those who have complained."
About 2,000 complaints were filed after the
elections, including about 50 thought to be serious
enough to affect the results in at some of the more
than 30,000 polling stations that were set up around
this country of 27 million.
"The work is still going on and we are still
discussing all the information that we collected
from all sides, electoral commission, international
monitors and other (political) lists," Mazin Shuaib,
executive manager of the International Team told the
AP.
He added that "we are not facing any problem in our
mission and all sides are cooperating, are clear and
transparent. We heard from lists that have
complaints and took all their points into our
consideration, but no commitments have been made to
any of them."
AP
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