African leaders appealed to the people of Liberia on Sunday to stay peaceful and shun violence in a dispute over a presidential run-off in which Harvard-trained economist Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf finished first, Reuters reported. The 67-year-old former finance minister is poised to become Africa's first elected female head of state after official voting returns showed her obtaining an unbeatable lead over millionaire soccer star George Weah in Tuesday's poll. But former AC Milan striker Weah, 39, whose supporters stoned police in Monrovia on Friday and staged a smaller protest on Saturday, is calling for a rerun. He says the run-off vote was riddled with fraud. African heads of state meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, praised what they called Tuesday's "peaceful, transparent, free and fair" presidential elections in Liberia, the first since the end of a brutal civil war that devastated the West African state. "They called upon all Liberians to jealously guard the prevailing peace and to desist from any acts that are likely to return their country to crisis," said the statement. --More 2227 Local Time 1927 GMT
