CAIRO, December 8, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Egyptian judges supervising the month-long parliamentary elections on Thursday, December 8, distanced themselves from the results of the bloody final round of voting, which saw the killing of at least eight people by security forces.

"We disavow the results of the third round's run-offs owing to flagrant violations by Egyptian security and will make our position public during the meeting of the Judges Union's general assembly on December 16," judge Mahmoud Al-Khudeiry told IslamOnline.net.

"The grave violations perpetrated by the police forces on Wednesday were unprecedented. It was a tough day not only for judges overseeing the elections but for Egyptians in general."

He accused the executive authority of finally "unmasking its ugly face," asserting that the security has interfered in the electoral process in variety of ways.

Voter frustration at the Egyptian police's closure of polling stations spilled over into scenes reminiscent of the Palestinian Intifada Wednesday, with youngsters hurling stones at security forces, who opened their fire randomly killing at least eight people.

After the second round of elections, judges pressed for army protection, accusing police of allowing thugs to enter polling stations, attack them, break and burn ballot boxes and terrorize voters.

They have also called on President Hosni Mubarak to sack Interior Minister Habib el-Adli over outrageous violations in the polling and attacks on judges.

Egyptian protestors throw stones at riot police in the Delta town of Mansoura. (Reuters)

The Doha-based Aljazeera news channel said Thursday that a number of judges overseeing elections in the Nile Delta city of Damietta staged a sit-in to protest voting results declared by the head of the governorate's main election committee.

The judges accused the committee heads of declaring the victory of Samir Moussa, a candidate for the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) contrary to vote counting.

They said their counting of the ballots gave the parliamentary seat to Saber Abdel-Sadiq, the candidate of the banned but tolerated Muslim Brotherhood.

Although Abdel-Sadiq secured 16,000 votes compared to only 10,300 voted for Moussa, the head of the election committee declared the NDP candidate victorious with 18,000 votes, said the Brotherhood on its Web site.

Partial results released by the electoral commission on Thursday gave the NDP 102 seats in the runoffs, brining to 314 the number of seats the ruling party and affiliated independents have own in the 454-member legislature.

The Muslim Brotherhood has won 12 seats in Wednesday's runoffs, bringing to 88 the total number of seats in parliament, six times the number of MPs it had in the outgoing chamber.

By clinching almost 20 percent of parliamentary seats, the group made the most serious dent in Mubarak's 24-year-old autocratic rule.

Judge Hisham el-Bastawisi, deputy head of the Court of Cassation, also scoffed at the government's intervention in the polling.

"The government should have instead appointed the majority of parliament members and only allowed the election of 20 percent of MPs," he said sarcastically.

"May be then the elections would have been fair and transparent," he told IOL Thursday.

He asserted that irregularities and violations that marred the final round of voting "are only a new black chapter" added to claims of freedom or expression and democracy in Egypt.