Bidhya Devi Bhandari, vice chairman of the ruling CPN-UML, was on Wednesday, 28 October elected the president of Nepal, making her the first woman to occupy the vaunted post.

Bhandari defeated Nepali Congress nominee Kul Bahadur Gurung in the presidential poll to be elected as the second president of the Himalayan nation. The election result was announced in parliament by Speaker Onsari Gharti Magar.

A former defence minister, Bhandari is a cancer survivor and widow of late communist leader Madan Bhandari, who died in 1991 in an unexplained road accident.

The incumbent, Ram Baran Yadav, who belonged to Nepali Congress, was elected president after the first elections to the Constituent Assembly in 2008.

Under the country's new republican federal Constitution, promulgated on 20 September, it was mandatory to elect new president and vice-president, prime minister, parliament speaker and deputy speaker.

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