Moderate Islamist leader Sheikh Sharif Ahmed has been elected Somalias new president, after a secret ballot of members of parliament, BBC online reports Saturday.
Mr Ahmed comfortably won a majority in a second round of voting after one of the frontrunners, Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein, withdrew. The election followed the resignation of President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed. MPs met in Djibouti because of instability in Somalia, where Islamist militias control much of the country.
Mr Ahmed was until recently the leader of an opposition movement accused of having links to al-Qaeda. He won the election as the one man who may be able to straddle the political extremes between the secular warlords, who until now have dominated government, and the Islamist al-Shabab militia.
Earlier this week, 149 new opposition members from the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS), which is led by Mr Ahmed, were sworn in to parliament. But al-Shabab says it will not recognise the new government.
Somalia has not had a functioning central government since 1991, and the northern regions of Somaliland and Puntland have broken away to govern themselves.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in successive waves of violence. More than a million people have fled their homes and 43 per cent of the population – 3,5 million – need food aid, donors say.
