COLOMBO: Sri Lanka's fifth Presidential election concluded on a largely peaceful note on Thursday.

By the close of polls at 4.00 p.m., an estimated 75 per cent turnout was registered outside the northeast, an elections department official told The Hindu.

The counting of votes commenced on Thursday evening at 710 counting centres spread across the island-nation's 22 electoral districts. A low turnout was reported from Tamil voters in the northern and eastern districts as a result of a "boycott" call given by the LTTE's front organisations. Voting was brisk in electoral districts outside the northeast.

President Chandrika Kumaratunga and the two main Presidential candidates, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse and Opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe, cast their votes at polling stations located in their respective electoral districts.

Sources close to Mr. Rajapakse — who turns 60 on Friday, the day the election results are expected to be announced — said the Premier's first priority would be to address the "burning issue of ethnic conflict."

Mr. Wickremesinghe said his first priority would be to "hold talks with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party on the peace process."

Thursday's low turnout in Jaffna follows a formal announcement of "disinterest" in the poll by the LTTE and MPs from the LTTE-backed Tamil National Alliance (TNA).

Subsequently, the LTTE's front organisations called for a poll boycott and declared the election day as a "black day." This resulted in a low turnout in the northern Jaffna electorate. Barring a couple of incidents of assault and the stoning of a government transport corporation bus, the northern Jaffna Peninsula was largely violence free, sources said.

The turnout at cluster polling stations — set up in government-controlled areas to enable civilians from LTTE-held areas to cast their votes — was negligible. According to northern sources, just one person turned up at one such polling station located between Jaffna and the LTTE-controlled Vanni. At another cluster polling station in Omanthai, south of Kilinochchi, only four persons came to vote from LTTE-controlled areas.

The eastern districts, however, presented a different picture with Tamils registering a low turnout, but Muslims and Sinhalese exercising their franchise in large numbers.

Three separate incidents of violence were reported from the eastern districts, including a grenade attack at a polling station in which no one was injured.

Local and international election monitors, including a team from the European Union, spread out across Sri Lanka to observe the island-wide poll.

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