Bhutto Again Under House Arrest

By Matthew Williams
10:46, November 13th 2007
62 votes
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Bhutto Again Under House Arrest

Today Benazir Bhutto was placed for the second time under house arrest by the Pakistani police in order to prevent her from holding her planned march of 180 miles from Lahore to Islamabad, Guardian Unlimited reports.

Hundreds of police officers surrounded her house and used barbed wire and trucks loaded with sand to block the neighborhood.

The officers arrested party workers who tried to cut through the police barricades.

Ms. Bhutto urged President Musharraf to quit from his position as a president declaring that she would never serve under him.

Until now she only asked him to drop his uniform and become a civilian president, but this is the first time when she had asked him to resign for good from presidency.

She said: “It is time for him to go. He must quit as president,” Reuters reports.

Some of her party workers tried to get across the barricades, but they were detained by the police and thrown into police vans.

Ms. Bhutto was placed under house arrest by the Pakistani government for the second time in five days, this time for seven days, according to the New York Times.

Still it remained unclear of how would Ms. Bhutto react to this move.

Police officers were waiting for Bhutto’s supporters outside government buildings also.

According to CNN, Bhutto doesn’t want to acknowledge her house arrest. She didn’t want to sign the warrant on pretends that she was not available at that time.

According to a vice president of the party, Yousuf Arza Giani, all talks with the government were broken off. He added: “It’s really bad, extremely bad.”

Tariq Azim Khan, a government spokesman, said that she could be the target of another suicide-bomb attack, like the one that occurred on October 18, at her homecoming in Karachi after the eight year exile when 140 of her party members were killed.

Last night Commonwealth foreign ministers warned Musharraf that unless he drops the state of emergency and his post as army chief in the next nine days, Pakistan will be expelled from their organization.

This is the second time when Pakistan is threatened with expulsion from the Commonwealth since Musharraf seized power in 1999.

The issued statement said regarding the arrest of the opposition activists and restriction of the press as “violations against Commonwealth fundamental values of freedom of expression and human rights.”

Musharraf said on Sunday that the elections will be held by January 9 and this statement was welcomed by foreign ministers. Still they’ve said that the vote “would not be credible unless the state of emergency is removed and constitutional rights of the people, political parties and independence of the judiciary are restored,” Guardian Unlimited quotes.

On Monday two opposition parties said that they will boycott the elections if they are held under the emergency rule.



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