Lieutenant General (retd) Hussain Muhammad Ershad, a former president of the country and Chairman of Jatiya Party (JP), lost his all certificates on December 12, 1990, the day the fallen military ruler was arrested.
Ershad was forced to resign from the post of president by a mass upsurge on December 4 in 1990.
The JP chief registered a missing General Dairy (GD) with Cantonment police station on October 19, 2008.
According to the GD, H M Ershad lost his all original certificates from SSC to graduation on December 12. He registered such a missing diary, as the Election Commission in 2008 made it mandatory to show educational qualifications for any candidate contesting any parliamentary election.
Ershad submitted a photocopy of that GD along with an affidavit when he filed his nomination paper for contesting the ninth parliamentary elections in 2008.
Ershad did the same during filing of nomination paper before his participation in the January 5, 2014 elections, according to an EC official.
Ershad was born in Dinhata of British India in 1930. He passed SSC from a Coochbihar school in West Bengal.
His parents migrated from Dinhata, the then subdivision in Coochbihar district of Indian state West Bengal, to East Pakistan after the 1947 partition.
He admitted to Carmichael College in Rangpur but he left the college without passing HSC.
Ershad claimed he did his graduation from the University of Dhaka in 1950.
He was commissioned in the Pakistan Army in 1952. He was an adjutant in the East Bengal regimental depot in Chittagong. Meanwhile, HM Ershad served his last battle for Pakistan Army in 1971 until Bangladesh's emergence as an independent nation.
Meanwhile, all efforts to get back his lost certificates have turned futile, according to HM Golam Reza, a former JP lawmaker from Satkhira.
"I visited Dhaka and Rajshahi boards several times at the directive of the party chairman but failed to collect his certificates," Reza told the Daily Observer.
Reza, who was expelled from the Jatiya Party for allegedly breaching party discipline on October 6, 2012 after a long 22-year association with the party, further said his Coochbihar mission to search for Ershad's SSC certificate also yielded no result.