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Lukashenko loyalists to hold rally

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MINSK, March 19 (RIA Novosti) - Loyalists of Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, seeking a third term in Sunday's presidential polls, are staging a rally to express support for their candidate on election day, a City Hall official said Sunday.

The rally is to be held in the capital of Minsk at 7 pm Sunday night (5 pm GMT).

Opposition backers said they, too, were planning rallies to protest alleged vote rigging and demand a rerun.

Exit polls by two groups loyal to Lukashenko projected that the incumbent would get more than 80 percent of the vote. They made their polls public only a few hours after voting began, in defiance of the common practice of not releasing exit polling results until the end of voting.

Belarus' hard-line president routinely harassed opposition leaders and media in the run-up to Sunday's ballot, and has banned election-day rallies in an effort to prevent the kind of protests that had swept opposition leaders into power in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.

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