The Election Commission will take more time to decide about legal steps to strip BNP's Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury of his parliament membership, chief ATM Shamsul Huda said yesterday. "The legal aspects need to be observed more carefully," the chief election commissioner told reporters at the Jamalpur Circuit House before visiting the district election office.

The EC has charged Chowdhury with submitting untrue information in the affidavit. He said the EC won't move if it does not have hints of certain result. "There are two explanations in the law about not giving true information in the affidavit. These issues must be solved by 30 days of conducting elections." But a lot of time has gone by," he added.

In June, the EC wrote to speaker Abdul Hamid recommending cancellation of Chowdhury's Chittagong-2 parliamentary seat for providing false information in his nomination papers prior to the December national polls. Later that month, however, Hamid told reporters that any decision regarding Chowdhury's House membership fell within the EC's purview. Chowdhury had earlier told the news agency by phone from Singapore on June 16, that he had not provided any false information in his nomination affidavit regarding his educational credentials.

The EC has alleged that Chowdhury, in his affidavit submitted prior to the 2008 polls, stated he had no educational credentials, which did not match information he had supplied for previous parliamentary records. The parliament secretariat had pointed the EC to Chowdhury's biographical details lodged with the parliament library. He was an MP during the second, seventh and eighth parliaments. An affidavit submitted by Chowdhury ahead of the second parliamentary elections stated he passed his SSC from St Placid's School in Chittagong, his HSC from Notre Dame College and took his degree from Punjab University.

The parliamentary documents also say that Chowdhury returned to Bangladesh following his father's death, leaving his law studies incomplete at Lincoln's Inn, London. Other documentation lodged with the parliament shows he completed his matriculation from Sadiq's School in the Punjab. About local government elections, Huda said, "Dhaka City Corporation elections will be held first, and then the municipalities and the union parishads at six divisions will go to vote for six days."

-The Independent