¡¡BAKU, Azerbaijan, Nov. 7 (Xinhuanet) -- Azerbaijan's ruling New Azerbaijan Party is poised to win Sunday's parliamentary elections as preliminary results showed it has won 58 seats in the 125-seat parliament, the Central Election Commission chief said on Monday.

    With 28 percent of the votes counted, the ruling party has won 58 seats while the opposition alliance Azadliq, which groups the Musavat party, the Popular Front and the Democratic Party, has only five seats, Mazakhir Panakhov, chairman of the Central Election Commission, told a news briefing.

    Independent candidates have taken 33 seats, he said, adding that "the elections were conducted in a democratic atmosphere."

    Azerbaijani voters cast their ballots on Sunday to elect a new 125-member parliament, the Milli Mejlis, under close scrutiny of international observers.

    More than 1,500 observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe havebeen monitoring the 5,000 polling stations across the oil-rich Caspian Sea nation.

    However, the opposition alliance Azadliq claimed there were frauds and called for nullification of the "falsified" elections.

    "The elections were not able to reflect the will of the people and were totally falsified," said Ali Kerimli, a top Azadliq leader.

    His alliance has recorded "numerous violations" during the voting and will "begin a peaceful constitutional battle for the cancellation of the falsified elections," he added.

    President Ilham Aliyev, who succeeded his father Haydar in 2003,had repeatedly pledged the parliamentary vote would be fair.

    He had asked the parliament to scrap a ban on foreign funded non-government groups monitoring the poll and to include voters' addresses in the voter list.

    Azerbaijan, saddled between Iran and the restive Russian Caucasus region, is a predominantly Muslim state of about 8 million people.

    Western corporations have invested billions of US dollars developing Caspian Sea oil and the capital Baku is the starting point for a new oil pipeline to the West.

    The poll was preceded by months of street protests and arrests as opposition activists held rallies in Baku nearly every weekend in the run-up to the elections. Most of them were dispersed by police who cited a ban on downtown protests.

    Less than three weeks before the vote, Aliyev's government announced the discovery of an alleged coup conspiracy led by RasulGuliyev, an Azadliq leader in exile. Several government ministers and other high-ranking officials were jailed.

    Guliyev, a former parliamentary speaker who has been living in the United States for the past decade to avoid embezzlement charges, was briefly arrested in late October in Ukraine on a fueling stop when he chartered a plane to return to Baku for the parliament vote and then headed for London. Enditem