Incumbent President Emomali Rakhmonov won re-election in the presidential election in Tajikistan, the central election commission said on Tuesday, citing preliminary results.

Rakhmonov, who chairs the People's Democratic Party, garnered 79.3 percent of the vote with 91 percent of the ballots counted, Mirzoali Boltuyev, chairman of the Central Commission on Elections and Referenda, told reporters. Rakhmonov was thus re-elected to a seven-year term.

Rakhmonov has been viewed as a guarantor of peace in Tajikistan, a landlocked, mountainous country of 7 million people in Central Asia that suffered from a civil war in the 1990s.

Among the other four candidates in the poll, Olimdzhon Boboyev of the Party of Economic Reform finished a distant second with 6.2 percent of the vote. Amirkul Karakulov of the Agrarian Party won 5.3 percent, Ismoil Talbakov of the Communist Party 5.1 percent and Abdukhalim Gaffarov of the Socialist Party 2.8 percent.

Voter turnout stood at 91 percent in the poll, for which about 3.4 million voters were registered, Boltuyev said.

More than 700 international observers monitored the vote. Some of them were sent by international groups like the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Source: Xinhua