DHAKA: An alliance headed by Bangladesh’s former Prime Minister Hasina Wajed took a strong early lead in unofficial results from yesterday’s parliamentary polls, election officials said.

They said Hasina’s alliance had won 88 out of 106 seats so far in the 300-seat Parliament, with 16 going to a group led by Khaleda Zia, another former prime minister and rival for power, and two seats to candidates outside the two alliances.

The vote aimed to return Bangladesh, a country of more than 140 million people, to democracy after two years of emergency rule imposed by an army-backed government. For the most part the election avoided the problems of the previous polls, which were marred by violence and accusations of vote rigging.

“The election ended in a very peaceful environment and I never saw such a congenial atmosphere. The turnout was tremendous,” Taleya Rahman, executive director of monitoring group Democracy Watch, told Reuters.

Official results will not be available until later today. Officials and analysts said it was unclear if the losers would accept the results or take their supporters back onto the streets to protest.

“We have waited so long ... but (are) feeling good the election is held at last,” Hasina said after casting her vote. Khaleda, leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), said: “If the election is free and fair, InshaAllah (God willing) we will win and form the next government.”

In Dhaka, voters in cheerful mood waited for up to an hour to cast their ballot, many milling in the streets afterwards to chat. Men and women, many of the latter in brightly colored saris and head scarves, voted at separate sites.

In the past, Bangladeshi elections were often marked by fraud and intimidation, party supporters taking to the streets for protests, strikes and confrontations both before and after polling day.

This time the government deployed 50,000 troops, 75,000 police and 6,000 members of its elite Rapid Action Battalion along with other auxiliary forces for security.

About 200,000 local and 2,000 foreign monitors were at the election centers to check procedures.

“There have been (reports of) some minor problems, but those were mainly for technical reasons, not intentional or for bias,” Damaso Magpaul, chief of the Asian Network for Free Elections, told Reuters.

Bangladeshis voted in their droves yesterday in elections that marked the end of two years of emergency rule, with a pair of rival former prime ministers vying to reclaim power in the impoverished nation.

Amid tight security, the first polls since 2001 saw a turnout as high as 70 percent, with none of the violence that forced the last scheduled vote to be canceled and an army-backed interim government take control.

Long queues snaked outside voting stations all day as hundreds of thousands of police and troops stood ready to avert clashes between party activists or any attacks by Muslim extremists.

Polls officially closed at 4 p.m. (1000 GMT), although officials said those still in line would be allowed to vote.

After voting in the capital Dhaka, Hasina questioned how some ballot papers had been distributed but insisted, “I want the election to take place peacefully. Whatever the result is, we all should accept it.”

Khaleda appeared confident of victory. “If a free and fair election takes place today, we will win with a landslide victory like the 2001 election,” she said.