Awami League leader Titu reelected Mymensigh city mayor

Awami League leader Ekramul Hoque Titu has been voted back to the office of the mayor of Mymensingh City Corporation by a huge margin of 103,841 votes.

Titu bagged 139,604 votes while his nearest rival Sadequl Hoque Khan got 35,763, according to the results announced by Returning Officer Belayet Hossain Chowdhury on Saturday night.

In the voting from 8m to 4pm, Ehteshamul Alam received 10,773 votes, Rezaul Haque 1,487 and the Jatiya Party’s Shahidul Islam got 1,321 votes.

A former leader of Bangladesh Chhatra League, Titu was elected commissioner of a ward in 1999 when Mymensingh was a municipality.

He was reelected commissioner in 2004 and then acted as mayor after the death of then mayor Mahhmood Al Noor Tareque in 2009. Titu was elected mayor of the municipality afterwards.

After the transformation of Mymensingh into a city corporation in 2018, Titu was appointed administrator to the local government unit before his election as mayor unopposed.

Mymensingh did not experience violent incidents like clashes in Cumilla during the voting, but a number of elderly voters expressed frustration upon being denied the opportunity to vote due to mismatched fingerprints in the EVM system.

After the Awami League decided against endorsing any candidates with its boat symbol, many party leaders contested the elections as independents.

The Jatiya Party fielded a candidate in the Mymensingh City Corporation election, and two former BNP leaders threw their hats in the ring for the Cumilla mayoral by-election.

Although candidates affiliated with the Awami League reported a satisfactory polling environment from the start, opposition candidates lodged complaints about agent expulsion, voter intimidation, and slow voting processes in both cities.