KUALA LUMPUR, May 9 — Dewan Rakyat Speaker Tan Sri Pandikar Amin Mulia has yet to issue any vacancy notice for the Sungai Besar and Kuala Kangsar seats, whose federal lawmakers perished last week in a helicopter crash in Sarawak.

“Actually, we have not yet received any letter from the Speaker at the moment,” the source who spoke on condition of anonymity told Malay Mail Online when contacted.

Earlier, newspaper The Sun cited a spokesman from the EC saying that the commission must convene a meeting within four days of receiving the notice to decide on the by-election dates.

Article 54 of the Federal Constitution states that by-elections must be held to fill casual seat vacancies, provided such vacancy is established within three years of the current parliamentary term.

The 13th Malaysian Parliament was convened on June 24, 2013.

The constitutional provision also stipulates that a by-election must be called within “60 days from that date on which it is established by the EC that there is a casual vacancy”.

Sungai Besar MP Datuk Noriah Kasnon, who is also a deputy minister, and Kuala Kangsar MP Datuk Wan Mohammad Khair-il Anuar Wan Ahmad were both on the ill-fated AS350 chopper that crashed last Thursday while enroute from Betong to Kuching in Sarawak.

Also aboard the helicopter were Noriah’s husband Datuk Asmuni Abdullah, Plantation Industries and Commodities secretary-general Datuk Dr Sundaran Annamalai, bodyguard Ahmad Sobri Harun, and the pilot Captain Rudolf Rex Ragas, a Filipino.

The bodies of all six have since been found.

Noriah won the Sungai Besar seat in Election 2013 with a majority of 399 votes over PAS’s Mohamed Salleh M. Husin.

Khair-il, on the other hand, beat PAS’s Khalil Idham Lim Abdullah and independent candidate Datuk Kamilia Ibrahim to clink the Kuala Kangsar seat with a 1,082-vote majority.