ISLAMABAD, March 24: The Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal is set to elect its new president in place of late Maulana Shah Ahmed Noorani when it meets in Karachi on April 8, alliance sources told Dawn on Wednesday.

According to the sources, acting president Qazi Hussain Ahmed is most likely to be elected the president of the religio-political alliance as the newly-elected Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan President Prof Shah Faridul Haq, being incapacitated for quite some time, is unable to shoulder the responsibility.

The next MMA supreme council meeting has been fixed for April 8 in Karachi so that Prof Haq could also attend it and witness the election of the new president.

It is, however, not yet clear whether the MMA will be able to overcome its deep-rooted internal differences. Apart from organisational and policy issues, the MMA's unity is endangered by its inability to take timely decisions about whether or not to stage public protest against the military operation in tribal areas, the sources said.

Maulana Samiul Haq, chief of his own faction of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam, who has missed three supreme council meetings in a row, may not attend Karachi meeting as well if no serious effort to woo him back is initiated by the alliance leadership.

The last supreme council meeting of the MMA in Islamabad on March 20 had appointed a larger committee headed by Prof Sajid Mir, chief of Jamiat Ahle Hadith, to contact Maulana Sami and to pursue him to not only attend the upcoming mass contact rallies of the alliance in Sindh but also to attend the next supreme council meeting at Karachi.

NWFP chief minister Akram Khan Durrani, who was conveyed the decision of the MMA to implement its earlier decision of accommodating one member each from the four smaller parties in his cabinet, has not complied with the decision.