The count was under way Thursday in a Libyan general election overshadowed by deadly violence in second city Benghazi, including the killing of a leading women’s rights activist

The count was under way Thursday in a Libyan general election overshadowed by deadly violence in second city Benghazi, including the killing of a leading women's rights activist.
  
The first results were expected as early as later Thursday, organizers said, from an election the authorities hope will pave a way out of the turmoil that has gripped the country since the 2011 ouster of dictator Moamer Kadhafi.
  
Masked men broke into the home of liberal activist Salwa Bugaighis in Benghazi, an Islamist bastion, just hours after polls closed Wednesday evening in an attack that drew international condemnation.
  
"Mrs Bugaighis was stabbed in several parts of her body but the cause of death was a bullet wound to the head," said a spokesman for the Benghazi Medical Centre.
  
US Ambassador Deborah Jones called the killing "heartbreaking" on Twitter, denouncing "a cowardly, despicable, shameful act against a courageous woman and true Libyan patriot."
  
Seven soldiers deployed to provide polling day security in Benghazi were also killed, and 53 wounded, in what security officials said was an attack on their convoy by militia.

There was polling day violence in western Libya too, with gunmen seizing ballot boxes from five polling stations in Al-Jemil, forcing voting in the town to be abandoned.
  
There was no election either in the eastern city of Derna or in swathes of the southern Kufra region. Polling for the 16 of the 200 seats in parliament that those areas provide will be reorganized a later date, the electoral commission said.
  
Just 42 percent of the 1.5 million registered voters turned out on Wednesday, according to the commission's preliminary estimates.