Bhutto calls on Musharraf to quit

OPPOSITION leaderBenazir Bhutto yesterday called on President General Pervez Musharraf to resign and ruled out serving under him in a future government after she was placed under house arrest for the second time in five days.

Ms Bhutto said Gen Musharraf was a hurdle to democracy and must resign both as president and army chief.

With the political turmoil deepening, deputy secretary of state John Negroponte was headed to Pakistan and expected to reiterate Washington’s calls for Gen Musharraf to lift the state of emergency.

Gen Musharraf’s critics and chief international backers, including the United States, have said the restrictions imposed by the military leader — such as on independent media and rallies — would make it hard to hold a fair vote in upcoming parliamentary elections.

Ms Bhutto was trapped in a padlocked house surrounded by thousands ofriot police, trucks, tractors loaded with sand, and a row of metal barricades topped with barbed wire. She said it was now likely her Pakistan People’s Party would boycott the January elections and ruled out serving another term as prime minister under Gen Musharraf.

“I simply won’t be able to believe anything he said to me,” she told reporters.

Her comments appeared to bury hopes of the political rivals forming a pro-US alliance against rising Islamic extremism. They had held months of talks that paved the way for Ms Bhutto’s return from exile last month to contest the elections.

But Railways Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, a close ally of Gen Musharraf, said he doubted Ms Bhutto had closed the door completely to any co-operation with the general.

“She talks one thing, but walks in a different way,” Ahmed said, adding her comments were a reaction to declining public support for her party. “She knows the election result will be different from what she thought. That is why she is trying to create a disturbance.”

In Karachi, Bhutto supporters fired on two police stations in a poor district where her party is popular, and police used tear gas to disperse demonstrators, senior police officer Fayyaz Khan said. A nine-year-old boy and a 22-year-old woman were wounded.