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Monday, September 25 7:36 PM SGT

Kostunica set for first-round win with 55 percent: opposition

BELGRADE, Sept 25 (AFP) -

Opposition candidate Vojislav Kostunica looks set Monday to win the
presidential poll with 55
percent of the vote, senior opposition activists claimed, citing unofficial
results from half the polling
stations counted.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic had obtained 34 percent of the vote,
said Cedomir
Jovanovic, a senior official with the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS),
told reporters.

"We claim with full responsibility that our presidential candidate is a
winner of Sunday's vote," said
Jovanovic.

The DOS also had a clear lead in the Yugoslav parliamentary and Serbian
local elections, he added.

Kostunica's own Democratic party of Serbia (DSS), gave almost exactly the
same result, basing
their figures on 54.66 percent of the votes counted.

Kostunica had won 53.9 percent of votes, while Milosevic obtained 33.6
percent, Zoran Sami of the
DSS told reporters.

Officials from Milosevic's party meanwhile, had not yet updated their
estimates.

Earlier Monday, Yugoslav deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic, a top
official with Milosevic's
Socialists, said preliminary results gave the president 44 percent of the
940,453 votes counted so
far.

Kostunica had 41 percent, he added, predicting an outright first-round
victory for Milosevic.

The Yugoslav federal electoral commission meanwhile has still to release
official details of voter
turnout or even preliminary results from Sunday's vote.

It suspended its work overnight Sunday after a row between government and
opposition
representatives over the vote count, said Sinisa Nikolic, a commission
member and DOS official.

Electoral commission members from the Socialist party of Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic
and its allies had decided to end the vote-count "because it was too late,"
Nikolic told AFP.

Representatives of the DOS, the Serbian Radical party and the opposition
Serbian Renewal
Movement refused to stop working.

Milosevic's allies called "security who expelled us and locked the room
where we were seated,"
Nikolic said.

He and other commission members had not been told when it would resume work,
he added.
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