By DPA,
Tehran : Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was nearing re-election as Iran’s president early Saturday, winning 65 percent of the votes counted so far, the Khabar news network reported.
With 68 percent of the votes count, Ahmadinejad had a clear and comfortable lead in the polls with almost 16 million votes. His main challenger, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, is still at 31 percent of the votes.
However, Moussavi claimed in a press conference in Tehran that he was the clear winner of the vote and accused the government of having manipulated both the voting process and the counting.
The presidential camp has also congratulated Ahmadinejad for his re-election and his supporters have already started celebrations in the Tehran streets.
Slightly fewer than 33 million ballots were cast, the interior ministry said, meaning that Ahmadinejad would need about 1.5 million more votes to win the election.
The other two candidates, Mohsen Rezaei and Mehdi Karroubi, have surprisingly only gained less than two and one percent respectively.