* Khartoum's most conciliatory comments to date
* Vote "meets standards" despite some intimidation reports
By Andrew Heavens
KHARTOUM, Jan 14 (Reuters) - A senior north Sudanese official said on Friday the south's independence referendum was largely fair and his ruling party would accept the likely vote for secession.
"We are satisfied with the process and, as it has been declared by the President (Omar Hassan) Al-Bashir, we will respect the outcome of the referendum ... It will most likely be for secession," Ibrahim Ghandour, from the ruling National Congress Party (NCP), told Reuters in an interview.
The most conciliatory comments to date from Khartoum will ease political tension in the south, where some commentators had warned that the north might try to disrupt the vote in an effort to keep control of the south's oil reserves.
On Friday, southerners started their penultimate day of voting in the week-long referendum on whether to declare independence, a plebiscite that it widely expected to see the underdeveloped region emerge as a new nation.
The poll caps a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of north-south conflict fought over religion, ethnicity and oil. It was Africa's longest civil war and killed an estimated 2 million people, forced 4 million to flee and destabilised much of the region.
Ghandour, the NCP's secretary for political relations, said the vote was "broadly fair" despite some reports of supporters of Sudanese unity being intimidated in remote areas of south Sudan's Bahr El-Ghazal states.
"I think till now the process is going smoothly. The most important thing is that it is going very, very peacefully ... I think it will meet with the standards required," he said.
"We still wait to see the final report of our observers as well as international observers."
He added: "If secession occurs we are ready to support a new state and we look forward to brotherly relations with our ex- citizens."
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