New York.  Zanzibar’s opposition leader Seif Sharif Hamad warned in Washington on Monday of growing frustration on the islands due to the alleged unwillingness of Tanzania’s ruling party to accept democratic election results.

 “If this trend continues, then we can smell a danger,” Mr Hamad told an audience of diplomats, lobbyists and scholars at a think tank in the US capital city.

 “Religious radicals will find an opening” in Zanzibar, an archipelago with a 98 per cent Muslim population, added Mr Hamad, the five-time presidential candidate of the Civic United Front in the Isles.

He said his party had scored “a decisive victory” in elections last October that were annulled by the Zanzibar Election Commission on the grounds of widespread fraud.

 The national government ordered a new election on March 21 that Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the ruling party in Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania, won with a reported 91 per cent majority.

 Mr Hamad’s party boycotted the re-vote. Only about 15 per cent of Zanzibar’s electorate cast ballots in that second election, he estimated.

 Obama administration officials can be expected to empathise with Mr Hamad’s complaints during meetings this week.

 A development assistance arm of the US government announced in March that it was suspending $473 million (approximately Sh 1 trillion) in projected grants to Tanzania in protest over nullification of Zanzibar’s October election results.

The re-vote ordered by the Tanzania government was “neither inclusive nor representative,” declared the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which had previously provided Tanzania with nearly $700 million (Sh1.5 trillion) in aid for water, transport and energy projects.