Voting for IAEA chief carried over to Fri.

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VIENNA, March 26 Kyodo -
The Thursday voting to pick a successor to International Atomic Energy Agency
Director General Mohamed ElBaradei was carried over to Friday as neither of the
two candidates won the required two-thirds majority.
The two are Yukiya Amano, 61, Japan's ambassador to the Permanent Mission of
the International Organizations in Vienna, and Abdul Samad Minty, 69, South
Africa's representative to the IAEA, who gave speeches at the session.
Amano took the lead over his rival in three rounds of voting at the IAEA's
35-nation governing board in Vienna, but he could not get a two-thirds
majority.
''We were not able at this stage to arrive to the nomination of the next
director general,'' Taous Feroukhi, chairperson of the IAEA Board of Governors,
and ambassador and resident representative of Algeria, told reporters after the
closed-door balloting.
The election process will continue Friday, she said.
The board will hold a fourth round of votes to see which candidate is the
leading one. After that a ''yes or no'' vote will be held on the leading
candidate. If he again does not manage to get a two-thirds majority, the same
''yes or no'' vote will be repeated for the second candidate.
If none of the candidates manages to get the necessary two-thirds majority in
any of the election rounds, the chairperson is expected to clear the slate for
new candidates again.
ElBaradei's third four-year term as the IAEA chief will expire in November.
==Kyodo
2009-03-26 23:14:13