Pakistan's opposition leader and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's PML-N appears set to emerge as the single largest party followed by Imran Khan's Tehreek-e-Insaf, dealing a severe blow to Pakistan Peoples Party, which led the last government.
As manual counting of votes progressed after the landmark elections that marked the first democratic transition in the country's 66-year history, intial trends available for 203 of the 272 seats at stake showed PML-N leading in 110, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf in 32, PPP in 31 while independents were ahead in 20 while JUI-F in 10, Geo News reported.
Sharif won from the Sargodha constituency in Punjab province while cricketer-turned-politician Khan won from the Peshawar 1 seat in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.
Earlier in the day, defying Taliban death threats and violence that claimed 26 lives, millions of Pakistanis voted in the historic general election.
The Election Commission had to extend polling by an hour to accommodate large numbers of voters who were still present at polling stations and officials said they expected the turnout to be around 60 per cent.
A staggering 75,000 security personnel, including 5,000 troops for sensitive polling stations Taliban-dominated restive areas in northwest, were deployed to ensure smooth conduct of the exercise.
Long queues and chaotic scenes were witnessed outside thousands of polling stations across the country despite threats of attacks by the banned Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, which said it would target the elections as they are part of the "infidel" system of democracy.
The turnout remained strong throughout the day despite a string of gun and bomb attacks in Karachi, the country's largest city, and across Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces.
The attacks killed at least 24 people and injured dozens.
A total of 4,670 candidates are standing for the 342-member National Assembly while nearly 11,000 are running for the four provincial assemblies in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan.
While polling took place in 272 National Assembly seats, the rest 70 seats are reserved for women and religious minorities. The reserved seats are allocated to political parties according to their proportional representation.
