Liberia will hold a run-off presidential vote as the incumbent Ellen Johnson Sirleaf failed to win an outright majority in results announced Sunday after nearly all the votes were counted.
Second place finisher Winston Tubman said he would contest in the second round, even though he accused the National Elections Commission (NEC) of trying to rig the first round results in Sirleaf's favour, prompting fears of a boycott.
Sirleaf, a 2011 Nobel Peace Laureate, took 44 percent of the vote, according to official results from 96.7 percent of the ballots, with Tubman, a former diplomat, at 31 percent. Turnout in the October 11 vote was 71.4 percent.
Concerns about political unrest emerged after nine opposition parties, including Tubman's Congress for Democratic Change, withdrew their agents from the NEC bureau late Saturday to protest a vote-counting process they rejected as fraudulent.
But on Sunday both Tubman and Sirleaf confirmed they would stand in the next round scheduled for November 8.
"For us there will be a second round", Musa Bility, campaign director of Sirleaf's Unity Party, told AFP.
"We will participate in the run-off because we believe that the figures as they have emerged do not allow for anyone to win the first round," Tubman told the BBC before the final results were announced.
"Therefore the focus must be on the second round and so we are beginning to rally our people."
In a joint statement Saturday, nine opposition parties, claimed there was "a calculated and deliberate act by NEC to rig these elections in favour of President Johnson Sirleaf and the Unity Party".
Notorious former warlord Prince Johnson, who finished third with 11.8 percent of the vote, could play a key role as kingmaker in the second round, even though he will not be on the ballot.
"We are going to fully take part in the second round, but we are not going to accept any more acts of fraud," his campaign manager Merlie Kemru told AFP before the final tally was announced.
The opposition's fraud claims sparked fears of a return to violence in a country still emerging from 14 years of back-to-back civil wars claiming a quarter of a million lives that finally ended in 2003.
The UN peacekeeping force MINUL, with some 8,000 troops, has stepped up patrols in Monrovia, setting up new barriers and checkpoints in a bid to ward off disturbances amid rising political tensions.
On Saturday, Liberia closed its borders with Ivory Coast, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
The UN is particularly concerned over the attitude of Liberian mercenaries who fought in Ivory Coast during the conflict that followed elections there last year. They returned home with their weapons.
Resident Martha Kwee said she and her husband were preparing for the worst. "We are here to buy enough food so that when they start their nonsense we will have enough food in our home," she said at a Monrovia market.
And religious leaders began leading prayers for peace in Monrovia's churches, temples and mosques.
"We are praying for our nation," evangelical pastor Joseph Gbedia told AFP. "We are going through a very, very difficult period of our lives."
An imam, Mamadi Kamara, said: "The solution to our problems is faith and prayer. What the opposition did yesterday is not a good sign for this nation. We all have to pray."
The election, seen as key to cementing a fragile peace in the country of some four million inhabitants, has won praise from the United Nations and African observers for its peacefulness and high turnout.
Sirleaf was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace prize just days before the first-round vote for her work in rebuilding the country and promoting women's rights.
While initially promising to serve only one term after becoming Africa's first woman president in 2005, the Harvard-educated Sirleaf has asked for more time to continue building the "broken country".
