Pakistan's election commission revised the schedule for critical by-elections in which senior leaders of the country's ruling coalition were planning to run, an official said Wednesday.
"We have set a new date for the by-polls and that is June 26," said the commission's secretary Kunwar Dilshad, the dpa reported.
The statement came two days after the independent state- institution announced that it was putting off for two months the voting originally scheduled for June 18 because of security concerns in the Islamic militancy-hit North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).
The coalition partners, led by slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party, condemned the decision as "one of a series of conspiracies hatched by President Pervez Musharraf," whose political allies were thrashed in the main general elections on February 18.
The NWFP government later revealed that the security advisor to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and a close aide to Asif Zardari, the widower of Bhutto and the head of the Pakistan Peoples Party that gained the majority seats, had pressed for the security-risks report in order to delay elections.
"We had no choice but to delay the elections on the report we received from NWFP government," Dilshad said.