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Pakistan's election commission confirmed on Tuesday that elections scheduled for Jan. 8 would be postponed, and a top official said the vote would take place after the second week of February.

The delay is in response to widespread rioting after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

All opposition parties have called for the vote to proceed and have warned they will hold street protests if the vote is delayed.

Bhutto, a former prime minister of Pakistan, was killed last week in what appears to be an assassination. In her will, she named her 19-year-old son as her successor to lead the Pakistan People's Party.

Kanwar Dilshad, an election commission spokesperson, said Tuesday it now "looks impossible" to hold the polls on Jan. 8, citing riots and arson as the major snags.

"Our offices in 10 districts of Sindh have been burned, the electoral rolls have been burned, the polling schemes, the nomination papers have been burned," he said. "We are in a very tricky situation."

The commission said a final decision would be announced on Wednesday after talks with political parties.

An official with the commission told The Associated Press that the election would take place in late February, but did not offer a specific date.

Meanwhile, anonymous U.S. officials said that the government had provided Bhutto's aides with a steady stream of intelligence about threats against her.

According to AP, they told her to improve her security ahead of the election, specifically to limit public appearances, beef up security detail and get better armoured vehicles.

Bhutto, however, has blamed her poor security on President Pervez Musharraf. In an email released after her death, Bhutto accused Musharraf of blocking a number of security upgrades she had requested from the government.

An atmosphere of tension

CTV's Steve Chao, reporting from Islamabad, said there is an atmosphere of tension as people await final word on whether elections will be delayed. If the vote is delayed, people are likely to take to the streets, he told Â鶹´«Ã½net.

"If (President Pervez) Musharraf does delay elections, many people here are saying he will have no choice but to declare martial law," Chao said.

Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, leader of another opposition party, threatened to take his supporters into the streets if the vote is delayed.

"We will agitate," Sharif told The Associated Press on Monday. "We will not accept this postponement."

Bhutto's party accused Musharraf of considering a delay in order to let anger over her death subside, in the hopes of softening the party's support.

"There have been elections in conflict zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan so I find it difficult to understand why this election cannot be held on time," Sherry Rehman, spokesman for Bhutto's party, told Dawn TV.

A number of international election observers are in the country with the intention of monitoring the vote. Chao said they are also awaiting the final decision, though there are questions whether they would be able to safely and effectively monitor the polls, even if the election went ahead as scheduled.

While election officials were meeting with politicians to discuss the possible delay, Sen. Latif Khosa, a former aide to Bhutto said Bhutto had been planning to release a report that accused the current ruling party of trying to rig the coming election, The Associated Press reports.

Bhutto had planned to give the 160-page report to U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and Rep. Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, according to Khosa. She said Bhutto was to have handed over the report at a meeting scheduled for a few hours after she was killed.

There is no word on whether her slaying was linked to the report.

It is reported to outline several alleged cases of election interference, paid for by U.S. military aid money that was meant to be used for fighting terrorism.

In one case, Khosa said, a high-ranking intelligence services officer sat with an election official while he rejected the nomination papers of Peoples Party candidates.

In another case, an official allegedly banned a candidate from filing nomination papers in Baluchistan province in Pakistan's southwest, Khosa said.

"The elections were to be thoroughly rigged, and the king's party was to benefit in the electoral process," he said, referring to the Pakistan Muslim League-Q party, which is allied with Musharraf.

Before she was killed, Bhutto repeatedly accused the government of rigging the vote. However, she had maintained that the vote should go ahead as scheduled, dismissing calls for a boycott that were put forward by other opposition parties.

She had warned that boycotting the vote would leave the race open to Musharraf loyalists.

So far, 58 people have been killed in violence following Bhutto's death.

On Tuesday, the Musharraf government said it would accept international assistance in an investigation into Bhutto's death.

The government has faced serious allegations of covering up exactly how Bhutto was killed. Original reports suggest she was shot several times before being caught in a suicide blast.

It was later said she was not shot and that she smacked her head on a metal handle in her SUV amid the blast's shock waves. No autopsy has been done on her body.