International donors will provide $500 million in aid to the Central African Republic this year to help the impoverished country recover after months of sectarian bloodshed, a top EU official said Monday.

Donor countries "are fully mobilizing to attempt to put an end to a crisis... which has been ignored for so long," EU International Aid Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva said after a meeting under EU and U.N. auspices in Brussels.

The parliament in the Central African Republic was set Monday to elect a new president in a second-round vote pitting Bangui's mayor against the son of a former head of state.

Mayor Catherine Samba-Panza took 64 votes, one fewer than the total needed to win the first round outright, against 58 for Desire Kolingba, son of ex-president Andre Kolingba, according to results read out in public session. Six other candidates had taken part in the race.

The violence-ravaged Central African Republic is caught in "a crisis of epic proportions," U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Monday, demanding immediate international action to stem the catastrophe.

"The CAR is in free-fall... We must act together, and act now, to pull CAR back from the brink of further atrocities," Ban said in a statement read by the acting head of the U.N. mission in Geneva Michael Moeller.

At least 50 people have been killed in a fresh wave of sectarian violence in the north-west of the Central African Republic over the weekend, the International Committee for the Red Cross said Sunday.

"In the past 48 hours, teams from the ICRC and the CRCA (local branch of the Red Cross) have buried around 50 bodies," the ICRC said in a statement.

Eight candidates are in the running for the interim presidency in the strife-torn Central African Republic, the transitional parliament announced Sunday.

Blaise Fleury Otto, head of a special electoral commission, said 24 dossiers had been whittled down to eight according to draconian selection criteria.

Ten Muslims, including three children, were killed in an attack while trying to flee to safety in the strife-torn Central African Republic, a charity said Saturday.

"It is a sign of the still fraught and highly dangerous situation in the Central African Republic that children and their families have been attacked and killed while trying to evacuate to safety," said Robert Lankenau from charity Save the Children in a statement.

Europe cannot leave France alone in its bid to restore order in the strife-torn Central African Republic, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in an interview to be published Sunday.

"Europe cannot leave France on its own there," he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

Fresh fighting broke out in the strife-torn Central African Republic as the deadline closed Saturday for candidates seeking to be chosen by parliament as the new interim president.

"There is some violence nearly everywhere," an officer with the MISCA African peacekeeping force told Agence France Presse, pointing to Bouar in the west near the border with Cameroon, the town of Sibut north of Bangui, and Boali to the northwest of the capital.

Not a single window pane remains at Bossangoa town hall, in the Central African northwest. Papers litter the floor and a brass band trumpet lies dumped in a sink, a desolate scene that sums up the ghost town it has become.

Bossangoa lies 250 kilometers (150 miles) from the capital Bangui, where lawmakers are due Monday to elect a new interim president in a bid to stem the deadly sectarian unrest engulfing the country.

The Central African Republic's new interim president will be elected on Monday, to succeed ex-rebel Michel Djotodia who resigned last week, the country's transitional authorities announced.

The strife-torn CAR's transitional parliament will elect the president at 10:00 am (0900 GMT), said the head of the assembly's legal committee, Blaise Fleury Otto.