Saleh won 77.17 percent of a total 5.37 million votes, far ahead of his main rival and former oil minister Faisal Bin Shamlan with 21.82 percent, the election commission announced on state television late Saturday.
Celebratory gunshots and fireworks were heard in the capital of the impoverished Arabian peninsula republic shortly after the results were announced but the opposition voiced defiance.
"We reject this result which is illegal, and came through a presidential order," said Ali Al Sarari, spokesman for the main Common Forum grouping of five opposition parties, which had fielded Shamlan.
"We have documents that prove the forging of two million votes, which were for Shamlan but were counted in favor of Saleh," he said, adding the Forum was studying its options.
Voicing distrust in the Yemeni judiciary, he charged that the results were "false" and that three members of the election commission had themselves "expressed reservations" over the figures.
The forum, however, did not bring up an earlier threat to call its supporters on to the street for a show of strength.
But an official weekly dismissed on Saturday the opposition claim of fraud as "impulsive and irresponsible politics" saying it reveals a "limited understanding of democracy."
"We say to those trying to distort the great success achieved by our people in the elections to revise their narrow interests and think deeply about the importance of this success for them and for the consolidation of democracy," said September 26, a mouthpiece of the defense ministry.
Bin Shamlan, 72, represented the first real challenge to the rule of 64-year-old head of the ruling General People's Congress who has been in power for 28 years. The electoral commission said 4.07 million votes were cast for Saleh, while Shamlan got 1.17 million votes.
Total votes were just over six million, out of 9.25 million registered voters, but some votes were discarded for not being filled in correctly, it said.
Three other contestants, who had not been expected to pose a meaningful challenge, shared one percent of the votes.
The opposition had said ahead of Wednesday's election that it feared that Saleh supporters might be tempted to falsify the results.
But the head of the EU monitoring mission, British peer Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, called the election "an open and genuine political contest" and "a milestone in Yemen's political history."
Nicholson said the election -- only the second presidential vote since north and south Yemen united in 1990 - "in general" met international standards.
But five people were killed in clashes between Saleh's supporters and opposition rivals on voting day. And the run-up to the vote had also been marred by violence, including sporadic clashes between rival supporters, the deaths of well over 50 people in stampedes at Saleh campaign rallies and a foiled attack on oil installations.
Saleh, who first took office as leader of the then North Yemen in 1978, has survived a 1994 civil war with the former communist south and Al Qaeda-inspired violence in Osama Bin Laden's ancestral homeland.
© 2006 Agence France-Presse
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