Turmoil strikes Pakistan after Bhutto sacking

Turmoil strikes Pakistan after Bhutto sacking

ISLAMABAD (Reuter): President Farooq Leghari sacked the government of Pakistan's most industrialized province yesterday as tremors from the dismissal of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto reverberated through the political system.

Acting on Leghari's order, the governor of the southern province of Sindh, Kamal Azfar, dissolved the local parliament and dismissed the government, his spokesman said in Karachi.

Bhutto's ancestral home is in Sindh, where the financial capital Karachi is located. Karachi, with a population of more than 12 million, has been torn by sectarian violence.

The Sindh governor named Mumtaz Bhutto, an estranged uncle of Bhutto, as the troubled province's caretaker chief minister.

The interim chief minister will replace Abdullah Shah of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP), whose dismissal came two days after his party's leader was removed by Leghari on disputed charges of corruption and misrule.

Mumtaz, an opposition deputy in the dissolved assembly, is the first cousin of Bhutto's father, executed former prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

Azfar's spokesman said the reasons for the dismissal of the Sindh assembly were similar to those cited by Leghari on Tuesday in a scathing order sacking Bhutto.

Leghari had justified his dismissal of Bhutto's government on the grounds that it was paralyzed by corruption, nepotism and misrule and had allowed security forces to kill "thousands of people" in Karachi and elsewhere.

The president, once an ally of Benazir Bhutto, was expected to dissolve the governments of the three other provinces.

The ousting of the local assemblies would clear the way for elections to both the federal and provincial legislatures in early 1997.

Leghari has asked caretaker prime minister Meraj Khalid to step up a fight against corruption.

Share prices on the Karachi stock exchange soared on Wednesday after Bhutto was sacked as investors anticipated a serious anti- corruption drive.

But prices fell back sharply yesterday after Moody's Investors Service downgraded Pakistan's credit ratings.

Leghari has set general elections for Feb. 3, but a pledge by Bhutto to fight her dismissal in court has added uncertainty to the timetable.

Bhutto met her detained husband Asif Ali Zardari in the early hours of yesterday for the first time since her dismissal two days earlier, her spokesman said.

The spokesman, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, said Bhutto had been taken to see Zardari at an official resthouse near Islamabad at about 9.30 p.m. on Wednesday, but had been made to wait for more than four hours before her husband was produced.

"Zardari was in good spirits and so was Bhutto," said Qureshi, former state minister for parliamentary affairs. He said he had not been at the meeting and had no other details.

The couple's reunion took place hours after Bhutto had threatened to bring kidnapping charges against Leghari.

Zardari was picked up by soldiers in Lahore on Tuesday and later transferred to Rawalpindi. The caretaker government said on Wednesday that he was in "protective custody," but did not clarify the grounds on which he was being held.

Zardari is the target of corruption allegations levelled against Bhutto's government and has also been accused of conspiring to murder Bhutto's brother Murtaza, killed by police in Karachi on Sept. 20. Zardari has denied the charges.