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U.S.-backed leader wins election

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania - The president who has led this Saharan nation for the past 19 years, moving it from support of Saddam Hussein to close ties with Washington and Israel, won re-election, his government declared Saturday. The top challenger, who was backed by Islamic hard-liners, emerged from hiding and claimed the vote was a fraud.

President Maaoya Sid'Ahmed Ould Taya's victory ensured Mauritania, a nation dominated by its Arab population, will remain a rare ally of Israel and the United States in the region.

Ihe Interior Ministry declared Taya the first-round winner with 67 percent of Friday's vote, but the results must be validated by the courts. His strongest competitor, Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidalla, trailed with 19 percent.

Haidalla went into hiding as soon as polls closed Friday, fearing detention after security forces abruptly arrested, then released, him on election eve.

The country has not seen a peaceful and democratic transfer of power since independence from France in 1960.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Supporters of Sri Lanka's prime minister Saturday rejected the president's appeal to form a coalition government, continuing a political crisis that has engulfed this island nation for days.

The turmoil erupted when President Chandrika Kumaratunga made a series of moves to entrench her power and weaken her main rival and childhood friend Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Justice Minister W.J.M. Lokubandara did not completely rule out the president's offer, made in a Friday night television address, but said her grabs for power had to be reversed before any decisions could be made.

"It is not normal to use force and then call for a coalition government," he said. "If we are to consider this, let us all go back to our previous positions."

VIENNA - Iran will firm up pledges next week to allow snap inspections of suspect nuclear sites and announce when it will suspend uranium enrichment, the head of the U.N. nuclear agency and a top Iranian official said Saturday.

Working to deflect the possibility of international sanctions, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, met with Hasan Rowhani, the head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council.

ElBaradei said afterward that Rowhani reaffirmed Iran's commitment to allowing more intrusive inspections of its nuclear facilities and suspending uranium enrichment.

KABUL, Afghanistan - After a gap of more than two decades, Afghanistan's commercial airline has relaunched its service connecting the capital Kabul to the southern city of Kandahar.

Brig. Gen. Joe Prasek, who heads the U.S. military's cooperation office in Afghanistan, said the new route would help boost Afghanistan's reconstruction.

Ariana Afghan Airlines suspended flights 24 years ago at the outbreak of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

TAPPETA, Liberia - The first U.N. peace missions to Liberia's rebel-held far east have found deserted towns emptied of all but looting insurgents and terrorized civilians under rebel grip or lying rotting, dead, in the bush.

An Associated Press reporter accompanying Gen. Daniel Opande, the Kenyan commander of Liberia's 3-month-old U.N. peace force, saw hamlet after hamlet bloodied by pillaging fighters, or by persistent clashes between rebels and government hard-liners.

"There is no war, no more ground for you to gain," Opande exhorted rebels in the eastern town of Griae - newly attacked, sacked and burned by the insurgents, four months after their leader signed the West African nation's peace deal.

Due to grow to the world's largest, at about 15,000, the U.N. force has seen only about 4,500 armed troops deploy - most West Africans with Bangladeshis the next largest contingent. Peacekeepers have been concentrated in Monrovia, the capital, since August.