Libyan moderates on course to claim election victory In Janzour, a satellite town of Tripoli, Mr Jibril's coalition scored 70.1 per cent of the vote, 63 points ahead of its nearest rival, the Islamist Justice and Construction Party, which took 6.4 per cent. The other main Islamist grouping, al-Watan, led by former Libyan Islamic Fighting Group leader Abdulhakim Belhaj, scored just 617 votes, or 1.6 per cent. Mr Jibril's NFA got less than 10 per cent of the vote. Misurata, which withstood three months' siege by Gaddafi forces, is controlled by a powerful and self-confident militia and local council. The result is likely to accelerate the city's tendency to see itself as in effect a separate, semi-autonomous republic within Libya. It will increase fears of potential conflict with the central government. The results so far represent only about 8 per cent of the 1.8 million votes cast on Saturday. But they suggest that informal predictions - based on individual polling-station tallies - of a moderate landslide may be accurate. Mr Jibril, a former university teacher in Pittsburgh and economy minister under Gaddafi, defected early in the revolution, becoming the rebel prime minister. He dealt extensively with Western governments to secure their support for the uprising. At a late-night press conference on Sunday, Mr Jibril appealed for all parties to "come together in one coalition, under one banner, to reach a consensus on which the constitution can be drafted and the new government can be composed." He also fiercely rejected the Western labels of "liberal" or secularist, stressing that Islam would be the main, though not the sole, source of Libyan law. The NFA has backpedalled on threats to sue the country's most senior cleric, Sheikh Sadiq al-Ghiryani, for issuing a pre-election fatwa against his party. Mr Jibril said the edict was a difference of opinion to which Sheikh Ghiryani was entitled. International observers praised the conduct of the elections yesterday, saying that violent incidents and anti-voting protests in the east of the country failed to prevent voters turning out in large numbers. "It is remarkable that nearly all Libyans cast their ballot free from fear or intimidation," an EU monitor, Alexander, Graf Lambsdorff, told a news conference. The violence, which cost two lives, "did not put into question the integrity of the election as a whole," he said. Islamist parties responded cautiously to Mr Jibril's call for a grand coalition, but did not immediately dismiss it.