LIBREVILLE, Gabon (AP) – Gabon’s government declared late dictator Omar Bongo’s son the winner of presidential elections yesterday, triggering the worst violence in years in the oil-rich nation.

In Gabon’s steamy coastal city of Port Gentil, mobs protesting 50-year-old Ali Bongo’s electoral victory burned France’s consulate, attacked the offices of French oil giant Total and pillaged shops.

Over 41 years, Omar Bongo amassed a fortune from the country’s oil wealth, owning 45 homes in France and more than a dozen luxury cars including a Bugatti worth $1.5 million. Meanwhile, a third of Gabon’s citizens lived in wretched poverty, some digging through garbage dumps for food.

Opposition supporters, feeling Sunday’s election was stolen and aghast that the Bongo family would continue to rule, turned their anger on the country’s former colonial ruler, France, widely suspected of having propped up the dictator and meddling in the elections.

In Paris, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Gabonese troops helped evacuate people from offices of Total and Schlumberger, the world’s largest oilfield services company.

“We firmly condemn these attacks on public order and we are ready to help French citizens if they need it,” Kouchner said. “For the moment, there is no need.”

A Polish female Schlumberger field engineer in Port Gentil was seriously hurt during rioting in the city, located 100 miles (160 kilometres) south of Libreville, said company spokesman Stephen Whittaker in Paris.

In the capital, Libreville, police fired tear gas at demonstrators, injuring one of the country’s main opposition candidates, Pierre Mamboundou, who reportedly went into hiding. The violence was also felt abroad as protesters in Dakar, Senegal, stormed Gabon’s embassy and set it ablaze.

The special ballot was called after Omar Bongo’s death in June, and many hoped the vote would turn a new page in a nation ruled by one man for the past four decades. Instead, the disputed poll is fuelling fears the forested country of 1.5 million people will destabilise.

Still, the unrest is not likely to affect global oil prices, said Leo Drollas, chief economist at the London-based Center for Global Energy Studies, noting Gabon’s small petroleum output. According to the US Energy Administration, Gabon produces 247,000 barrels of oil a day, around one-tenth of Nigeria’s production.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for calm and urged the candidates and their supporters to resolve grievances “through legal and institutional channels”, UN deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said at UN headquarters in New York.