Official results indicate that 74% of voters took part in the presidential poll, amid a boycott by some opposition parties and charges of major election fraud, the BBC reported on its news website.

Bouteflika faced relatively unknown challengers and had a well-funded campaign, the report said. His nearest rival was Louisa Hanoune of the Trotskyist Workers' Party with 4.22% of the vote. Moussa Touati of the Algerian National Front came third with 2.31%.

Bouteflika, 72, has promised to spend $150bn (£102bn) on development projects and create three million jobs, and stresses the fact that he has restored stability in Algeria.
According to the BBC, his critics say he is using the threat of renewed violence from Islamic militants to mask the country's deeper problems of poverty, high unemployment and corruption.

Thursday's vote was relatively peaceful although two soldiers were wounded when a polling station was bombed in eastern Algeria. But some opposition parties described the election as a charade.

"[There was] a real tsunami of massive fraud which reached an industrial scale," the Front of Socialist Forces, which boycotted the election, said in a statement.
Former head of Algeria's human rights league Ali Yehya Abdel-Nour told the BBC the official voter turnout figures had been exaggerated.

The election's outcome, he said, had been decided last November, when the government chose to amend the constitution to allow Bouteflika to run for a third five-year term in office. Algeria is slowly recovering from the 1990s civil war which left up to 150,000 people dead. The conflict was triggered when the military intervened in a parliamentary poll in 1991 to stop an Islamist victory.