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n independent committee tasked with selecting commissioners for the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) submitted the names of 48 candidates to the antigraft body for background checks on Tuesday.

Team member Yenti Garnasih said that background checks are crucial to determine whether candidates for the KPK commissioner positions had criminal records that could compromise their roles once they were elected.

'€œWe will trace the backgrounds of all the candidates,'€ Yenti told reporters at the KPK headquarters on Tuesday.

She said that the team had also submitted the list to the Attorney General'€™s Office (AGO), the National Police and the National Intelligence Agency (BIN) for similar background checks.

The recent ousting of sitting KPK commissioners Abraham Samad and Bambang Widjojanto brought into question how thoroughly a previous independent team had conducted background checks in 2011, although many believed that criminal charges against Abraham and Bambang, in forgery and perjury cases respectively, were engineered as part of a vendetta against the two for their decision to name Comr. Gen. Budi Gunawan a bribery suspect in January.

The eight will join two candidates picked by a selection team set up by then president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono: former KPK commissioner Busyro Muqoddas and Cabinet Secretariat Office international relations division head Robby Arya.

Meanwhile, KPK commissioner Adnan Pandu Praja said that the antigraft body would give the summary of its screening results to the team in the near future in a move to help it select clean candidates for the KPK jobs.

'€œIn our reports to the team in the future, we will mark whether the candidates have ever been questioned or are currently under the KPK investigation. We will also give to the team their wealth reports that they earlier submitted to the KPK [if the candidates are part of the state apparatus],'€ Adnan said on Tuesday.