Serb opposition trusts people power

Mr Kostunica says he has an absolute majority

President Slobodan Milosevic's challenger for the Yugoslav presidency, Vojislav Kostunica, is urging his supporters onto the streets in protest at a planned second round of voting.

Mr Kostunica says he has overwhelming evidence that he won Sunday's election and is calling the run-off an insult to voters.

The people have passed political judgement on Milosevic's policies... our duty is to convey this sentence

Vojislav Kostunica

His call follows an announcement by the official election commission on Tuesday night that no candidate had won outright in the first round.

Several Western countries have cast doubt on the results and repeated their calls for Mr Milosevic to accept defeat after 13 years in power. UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said a second round would be "a waste of time".

Wednesday night's rally in central Belgrade will be the first test of how much support the opposition has for its boycott of the second round.

The BBC's Jacky Rowland in Belgrade says the opposition strategy over the next few days will depend on how many people turn out.

Thousands of opposition supporters took to the streets throughout Yugoslavia after the electoral commission admitted late on Tuesday that Mr Milosevic had been beaten into second place.

'Fraud'

The commission said Mr Kostunica had polled 48% of votes to Mr Milosevic's 40%. But it said neither candidate had reached the necessary 50%, so a second round run-off would be held by 8 October.

Results in detail

Vojislav Kostunica: 48.22% or 2,428,714 votes

Slobodan Milosevic: 40.23% or 2,026,478 votes

Tomislav Nikolic: 5.1% or 256,876 votes

Other candidates and invalid votes: 6.83%

7,848,818 registered voters

64.16 % of voters cast ballots

Source: Federal Election Commission

The Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) coalition had earlier announced that with 97.5% of the votes counted, Mr Kostunica had won outright with 54.7% of the vote. According to the DOS, Mr Milosevic trailed with 35%.

Mr Kostunica was swift to reject the authorities' figures.

In a written statement he said: "We are talking about political fraud and blatant stealing of votes.

"We will defend the election results by all non-violent methods. We want to believe that common sense will prevail on the other side too."

US President Bill Clinton backed him, saying Mr Milosevic appeared to have lost his "last vestige of legitimacy".

He offered to lift sanctions imposed on Belgrade if what he called the will of the people was respected.

But unlike his European allies, he did not explicitly call for Mr Milosevic to stand down.