KARACHI: Former president Pervez Musharraf rejected on Friday allegations levelled by US lobbyist Mark Siegel that he had threatened the late Benazir Bhutto in a phone call made to her while she was planning to return to the country after an eight-year self-imposed exile.

According to Mr Siegel, PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari was there when the call was made.

The former army chief wondered why Mr Zardari, the husband of the deceased former prime minister, had not said anything about the matter during his five-year presidency.

“I strongly and unequivocally reject the claim of Mark Siegel, a close adviser, paid lobbyist and co-author of the last book of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto,” retired Gen Musharraf said in a statement a day after Mr Siegel, a witness in the Benazir assassination case, testified through video link before an anti-terrorism court.

“I am shocked and amazed at Mr Siegel’s assertion that I made a threatening phone call to Ms Bhutto. This claim is entirely false, fictitious and appears to be wilfully fabricated.”

Mr Siegel claimed that Ms Bhutto had received the phone call on Sept 25, 2007, in his presence, in the office of a United States congressman in Washington, which she later described as “a very bad call” from Mr Musharraf.

“She was shivering, trembling and terrified after taking the call,” he said.

Denying having made that call, Mr Musharraf said he had called Ms Bhutto only once, in October 2007 after her return to Pakistan.

“In that conversation I shared with Ms Bhutto intelligence information that had been conveyed to me personally by the leadership of the UAE, indicating that suicide bombers were planning an attack against her,” he said.

During his testimony, the lobbyist surprised many present in the court when he said that Ms Bhutto was accompanied by Mr Zardari when she went to the congressman’s office. The defence lawyers got another surprise when they saw Farooq H. Naek sitting next to Mr Siegel as his advocate.

Mr Musharraf said: “It is also extremely mystifying as to why former president Zardari, who Mark Siegel claims was also present with Ms Bhutto when she received this threatening phone call from me, has never mentioned it and did not pursue this claim aggressively while he was the president of Pakistan for five years.”

He said he had found the testimony ‘despicable’, adding that it could not be further from the truth. He termed the allegation “libellous, with malicious intent, designed and perpetuated through him by the enemies of Pakistan who want to distort facts in an attempt to shift the blame”.

“Mr Siegel’s statement also compels me to enquire from him why did he choose to omit this fabricated claim from the last book of Ms Bhutto: Reconciliation, Islam, Democracy and the West, which he co-authored and was published after Ms Bhutto’s assassination,” he said.

“It is also widely known in the public domain that Ms Bhutto wrote a letter to me a few days before her return to Pakistan in October 2007, in which she had expressed threats from Gen Hamid Gul, Brig Ejaz Shah and Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi. If I had also threatened her, I wonder why she would write to me to solicit protection from these gentlemen.”

He said he was confident that the “false politicised charges” against him would be discarded by the courts.

Answering a question after delivering a talk in the evening, Mr Musharraf said that in his only telephonic conversation with Ms Bhutto he had informed her about information from the United Arab Emirates’ intelligence that three suicide teams had come to harm her.

“Before that I had never spoken to her. It was in April 2009 that I got my first mobile phone. It was given to me by Sheikh Nahyan in Dubai. He had even designated someone to teach me how to operate the cellphone.”

Published in Dawn, October 3rd , 2015

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