The Asian Football Confederation, soccer's continental authority, has announced it will hold a presidential election in May, two years after its former head Mohammed Bin Hammam was first suspended by Fifa, the game's international governing body.

The AFC said the winning candidate from the May 2 election in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia will hold the post until 2015, as opposed to the normal four-year term.

Nominations for the position opened yesterday and will close on March 3, with Yousuf Yaqoob Yousuf, head of the United Arab Emirates Football Association and vice president of the AFC, and acting AFC president Zhang Jilong expected to run.

Jilong has been interim AFC president since Bin Hammam was suspended in May 2011 - and later banned - pending an inquiry into bribery allegations related to his campaign for the Fifa presidency. Zhang also assumed the Qatari's seat on the Fifa executive committee.

The AFC will also hold an election for the Fifa seat on a four-year term until 2017.

In December, Fifa announced that Bin Hammam had relinquished all his positions in soccer and was banned for life for a second time, for contravening the federation’s ethics code.

Bin Hammam had been suspended while the Fifa ethics committee investigated allegations of wrongdoing while he was president of the AFC and a member of the Fifa executive committee.

Fifa said that Bin Hammam had written to Fifa and the AFC on December 15 to resign from his positions but that the ethics committee still had a mandate to rule on the case and that the adjudicatory chamber had issued a new lifetime ban.

Bin Hammam was previously banned for life in July 2011, when he was found guilty of paying bribes to members of the Caribbean Football Union at a meeting in Trinidad and Tobago during his aborted campaign for the presidency of Fifa.

However, last July, this was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which cited a lack of evidence while maintaining that this did not necessarily mean that Bin Hammam was innocent.

Sportcal