Live Blog

RawyaRageh

Syrian Revolution General Commission says five people have been killed in protests on Tuesday.

 

In Mahalla, an industrial city that saw some of the first protests against the rule of former president Hosni Mubarak, election banners and posters drape the main square.

The last time people in the city voted - just over a year ago - Mubarak's security forces did everything they could to keep him in power, including closing polling stations and beating and accosting those who tried to monitor the process.

Now with this election, the people of Mahalla feel they are beginning to reap the first rewards of the January 25 revolution.

Al Jazeera's Jamal Elshayyal reports from Mahalla.

SherineT

adamakary

Syria's state-run news agency says an explosion has hit a gas pipeline in central Syria.

SANA said Tuesday's blast was near Rastan in Homs province and blamed it on "terrorists".

There have been several pipeline attacks since the Syrian uprising began in mid-March, but it is not clear who is behind them. The opposition accuses the government of staging the attacks. [AP]

 

File 57341

Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna reports from a polling station in Shubra El Khaima, north of Cairo:

In this area, the polls opened on time and voting has been going very smoothly. Long queues forming at all the polling stations.. This particular area is a bedrock of Muslim Brotherhood support. In 2010 there were elections held here, there was massive vote rigging according to most observers. The Muslim Brotherhood boycotted the runoff in those elections. Two years later you have an electoral process which by accounts at this stage is free and fair.. It does appear that in areas like this the Islamist parties, in particular the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice party are dominant. Some 70 per cent of the vote, it is understood, has gone to the Islamist parties so far, with the Freedom and Justice party the clear front-runner.

 

File 57321

Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros, reports from El Arish in the northern Sinai Peninsula, where voting is underway:

Overwhelmingly we are hearing people tell us that they will be voting for the Salafi Noor party or the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood's party, Freedom and Justice, so it's very much a lot of grassroots support for the Islamist parties here. When it comes to the individual candidates, people are not talking to us about policy and issue and what the individual candidates stand for; it is very much on tribal and clan lines, that's how people are voting here.

The Arab League secretary-general has called on Syria to stop snipers from shooting on civilians. 

Al Jazeera's Hashem Ahelbarra has been monitoring events from neighbouring Turkey.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe has said the Arab observer mission in Syria needs to be "clarified" and complained that Russia was blocking any UN condemnation of the Damascus leadership.

"The conditions under which this observer mission is operating should be clarified," Juppe told French television I-Tele, adding that he was "sceptical" about its progress.

Juppe questioned whether the observers really had free access to information, but said he would await their report, expected in the coming days, adding: "But I do not consider the battle is already lost."

He also insisted again that the UN Security Council "cannot stay silent" on the situation in Syria, and said he regretted that permanent Council member Russia "continues to block" any condemnation of the regime by the UN.

"It is clear that there is an absolutely savage repression going on, that the regime has no real future and therefore it is for the international community to decide," he said.

"The time is coming when the regime will be totally isolated." [AFP]