Ukraine police arrest two for poll site bombing, vote count stalls

Oct 5, 2007, 19:06 GMT

Kiev - Ukrainian police on Friday arrested two suspects in connection with the fire-bombing of a voting site, as election officials continued to wait for the last returns from parliamentary polls last weekend.

Law enforcers detained the pair in the western city of Lviv on charges of throwing a vodka bottle filled with burning liquid early last Sunday morning at the third floor of a government building containing ballots from the Sunday vote.

No one was in the building at the time, and firefighters extinguished the blaze quickly. The ballots were undamaged. The suspects face possible property damage and vote-tampering charges.

Ukraine's Central Election Commission (CEC) on Friday continued to wait for returns from five voting districts in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, two of which have yet to submit the voting results to election authorities.

The other three provided returns to the CEC earlier this week, but voting authorities in the capital sent the data back because of errors in the counts, the Interfax news agency reported.

Substantial delays in sending in returns were also registered in one Kiev voting district, and in Lviv district 112 - the site of the fire-bombing.

Some 99.65 per cent of all ballots cast in the election had been counted by Wednesday evening. A pro-Europe faction will likely form a majority in the next legislature, observers said.

Members of the expected ruling coalition are the anti-corruption Block of Yulia Tymoshenko (BYuT), the nationalist Our Ukraine National Self-Defence (OUNSD), and possibly the smaller Block of Volodymyr Litvin (BVL). The coalition will operate with a majority of 228 to 248 votes in the 450-seat house, observers said.

The pro-Russian Regions Ukraine and the Marxist Communist Party of Ukraine will most likely be in opposition.

Oleksnader Turchinov, the number two candidate on the BYuT list, called on central government officials to prevent ballot-tampering, and to allow all the returns to be received so the government can make the results officials.

'They must do whatever it takes to prevent a cynical effort by a few people to change the results of the vote,' Turchinov said. 'This is nothing less than sabotage.'

Regions Ukraine officials, in yet another sign the elections have been accepted almost across the board by the country's usually feuding political clans, told reporters that despite the failure of the government to announce results quickly, they believed the Sunday vote had been clean.

'We are in no mood to protest the results,' said Vladislav Sabarsky, a Regions representative to the central election commission. 'We have absolutely no information of massive or systemic violations.'