Guinea-Bissau holds the second round of presidential election on Sunday to choose between the ruling party leader Malam Bacai Sanha and former president Kumba Yala.

Guinea-Bissau held the first round of the presidential election on June 28 in which no candidate won an outright majority to be declared as the winner.

The presidential election came after President Joao Bernardo Vieira, who ruled Guinea-Bissau for 23 years, failed to survive the attack on March 2, when "men in uniform" gunned him down at his residence in a revenge attack hours after an explosion killed his rival, military chief of staff Batista Tagme Na Waie.

Nearly 160 observers from the African Union (AU), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Community of Portuguese- Speaking Countries (CPLP) and European Union (EU), are supervizing people's voting in 2,400 polling stations across the country.

According to the election commission, Malam Bacai Sanha of the ruling Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC) took the lead in the first round of the presidential election, garnering 133,786 votes, or 39.59 percent.

Former president Kumba Yala, who represented the leader of the Party of Social Renovation (PRS), took the second place in the race scoring 99,428 votes, or 29.42 percent.

Under the Constitution, the two leading candidates will go into a run-off within 30 days if neither wins 50 percent of the votes in the first round.

The election commission put the turnout in the first round at 60 percent, deploring the impacts of the serial killings on the registered voters.

There were 11 candidates running for the presidency in the first round, including the front-runner Sanha. The 62-year-old man was president of the National Assembly from 1994 to 1999. He acted as president of the 1999-2000 transitional period.

Sanha ran twice for the presidency, but lost to his rival Kumba Yala in 1999 and Vieira in 2005 respectively.

His PAIGC, the traditionally dominant party, won the legislative elections in November, scoring 67 of the 100 seats in the National Assembly (parliament).

Yala, 56, was president between 2000 and 2003. His PRS took the second place in the legislative elections in November, winning 28 seats.

Following the death of Vieira, President of the National Assembly (parliament) Raimundo Pereira has been acting as the interim head of state under the Constitution.

Guinea-Bissau has long suffered coups and coup attempts since its independence from Portugal in 1974. The country of 1.5 million population is among the poorest in the world, being ranked the 175th out of 177 nations in the UN Development Program's Human Development Index.

With a jagged Atlantic coastline, the country is being used by traffickers as a major hub for the flow of cocaine from Latin America to Europe.

The international community hopes the elections will end protracted instability and thwart attempts to make Guinea-Bissau a lawless narco-state.

(Xinhua News Agency July 26, 2009)