Aides to Comoros’ popular religious leader Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi said yesterday he had won the islands’ presidential election, though counting is still under way in the Indian Ocean archipelago.

Comorans across the three islands voted on Sunday in the last round of a race aimed at ending a cycle of mercenary-led coups and inter-island strife since independence from France in 1975. “We think we have 60 to 75 percent of the vote on the three islands from the tally we’ve done from polling stations,” Jaffar Mohamed, one of Sambi’s campaign directors, told Reuters.

Electoral commission officials on the biggest island of Grande Comore said ballots from the smaller islands of Anjouan and Moheli were still being counted, and provisional results were expected later yesterday.

Sambi, a Sunni Muslim nicknamed “Ayatollah” because he studied political Islam at university in Iran, was the favourite in a race dominated by concerns about corruption and poverty among the population of 670,000.

Thousands of supporters gathered in the streets of Moroni early yesterday cheering Sambi, a businessman, former parliamentarian and keen basketball player, who has vowed to end graft, create jobs and build houses for islanders living in straw shacks.

“God willing and if the government doesn’t stop us, the Ayatollah has won. The Comorans want change and he’s the one to do it,” said Djoauharia Said, a trader, as she danced to Sambi’s campaign song.

“We’ve put up with bad governments for years, now it will be different,” said Mzee Tabibou, a healthcare worker.

“According to reports from electoral agents in polling stations throughout the island, it seems Sambi has 70 percent of the vote,” the island’s interior minister Mohamed Shafioun Ahmed said.