Councillor faces deselection over ‘voting fraud’

Liberal Democrats in a Birmingham district associated with a 2004 postal voting scandal are expected to deselect a council candidate this afternoon after his wife was arrested by police investigating ballot fraud.

Lib Dem leaders on the council are due to meet this afternoon to consider Mohammed Gultasab Khan’s candidacy ahead of next Thursday’s local elections.

Mr Khan’s 50-year-old wife, Naseem Akhtar, was released on bail last night pending further inquiries by police.

Officers said a “large number” of postal votes had been recovered from the address in Ronald Road where Mrs Akhtar had been arrested, and that material had also been seized from a house in Hob Moor Road where Mr Khan was a registered resident.
In all, 17 voters are registered as living at the Ronald Road property and 12 at the house on Hob Moor Road. Some of the names of the registered voters, including Mr Khan’s, appear to have been written using alternative spellings.

Tariq Khan, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader on Birmingham city council, said Mr Khan’s position already looked “very questionable”.

He said this afternoon’s party meeting would take a “very tough stance”. “We will have to make a decision about the future of Mohammed Gultasab Khan,” he told Guardian Unlimited. “It’s the image of the party that is on the line here. We will take action swiftly.”

Mr Khan is the Liberal Democrat candidate for the council’s Nechells ward. The district lies between the Aston and Bordesley Green wards, in which an elections court last year found six Labour councillors guilty of electoral fraud that a judge said “would disgrace a banana republic”.

Mr Khan is also a former candidate for the People’s Justice party (PJP), a local party drawing its support mainly from Kashmiri Muslims in inner-city districts of Birmingham.

PJP members were among the most vocal critics of the Labour vote-rigging scandal, which centred around postal votes cast in Birmingham’s 2004 council elections.

Last month, the party disbanded en masse and switched its support to the Liberal Democrats. The council is currently run by a Tory-Lib Dem coalition that has a majority of 24 over Labour.

Labour councillor Tahir Ali said yesterday he had tipped off the elections office to the alleged fraud in the Nechells ward. He said the system was being abused “so openly you would not believe it”.

Shaukat Ali Khan, a Lib Dem councillor who was previously a member of the PJP, blamed an error within Birmingham’s elections office for the multiple registrations.

He said Mr Khan and his wife lived at different addresses, and named 11 of the registered voters as Mr Khan and his wife, and their five daughters, two sons and two daughters-in-law.

Mr Khan had informed Birmingham’s elections office around a month ago that several individuals were listed at both addresses, Mr Ali Khan said.

“The elections commission should make their inquiry first before they go to the police,” he said.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006