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  Date / Time: 8/13/2009 7:51 AM UTC

  Musharraf Faces Arrest on Return to Pakistan
  

  Source: NY Times

  Islamabad police officials said Tuesday that they had registered a criminal case against former President Pervez Musharraf for detaining Supreme Court judges after he imposed emergency rule in 2007, raising the prospect of his arrest if he returns to the country.
  
  “If he comes back to Pakistan, we will arrest him and present him before the court,” Hakim Khan, an Islamabad police official, said, referring to Mr. Musharraf. The charge is, however, one for which he could post bail, he added.
  
  Mr. Musharraf resigned last year after facing the threat of impeachment and is currently living in London. Political analysts said Mr. Musharraf might be bracing for a long exile.
  
  A Supreme Court decision last month declared the emergency rule he imposed in late 2007 illegal and unconstitutional. During that time, Mr. Musharraf removed the Supreme Court chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, and dozens of other judges, fearing they would not validate his candidacy for presidential elections while still serving as army chief.
  
  After the judgment, a court in Islamabad ordered the police to begin a criminal case against Mr. Musharraf for detaining 60 judges and their families at their residences in Islamabad, the capital. On Tuesday, police officials confirmed that the case had been registered.
  
  The opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, is now demanding that the government led by the Pakistan Peoples Party initiate treason charges against Mr. Musharraf. Mr. Sharif has his own score to settle with Mr. Musharraf, who toppled his government in 1999 in a bloodless coup.
  
  Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, however, said last week that his government would move against Mr. Musharraf only if Parliament passed a unanimous resolution.
  
  Rashid Qureshi, a retired major general, who has acted as a spokesman for Mr. Musharraf, said the process of trying his former boss in courts reeked of a personal vendetta by the politicians and judges.
  
  “I don’t understand the media hype by certain vested interest groups,” Mr. Qureshi said. “Isn’t it ridiculous? President Musharraf served the country for eight years. I am horrified and shocked at the way our political leadership and legal fraternity is behaving.”
  
  Mr. Qureshi said the Supreme Court ruling last month that declared Mr. Musharraf’s emergency rule illegal and unconstitutional was “questionable itself.”
  
  “Legal ethics demanded that the judges should not have been part of the Supreme Court bench as they themselves were involved,” he said.
  
  Justice Chaudhry headed the 14-member bench that issued the judgment against Mr. Musharraf. But Rasul Baksh Rais, a political analyst, said it was no surprise that a case had been filed. “It is a well-known fact that after Nov. 3, the judges were detained in their houses,” he said.
  
  Mr. Rais said the opposition leader, Mr. Sharif, was hoping to make political gains out of Mr. Musharraf’s troubles.
  
  But former political allies of Mr. Musharraf have also slowly distanced themselves from him as his legal troubles have increased.
  
  Tarik Azeem Khan, a senator who served as deputy information minister in the last government, said no one was above the law, and that applied to Mr. Musharraf as well.
  
  But he said the government gained from the media coverage of Mr. Musharraf’s trial as it “diverts the attention of the people from real issues facing the country,” like a flagging economy and the Taliban insurgency.
  
  “For us, the trial of Mr. Musharraf is not an immediate issue,” Mr. Khan said.
  
  There has been speculation in the country that the country’s powerful military would not like to see its former chief dragged through the courts. “I think the army would advise him not to return,” said Mr. Rais, the political analyst.
  
  Local newspapers, meanwhile, have reported that Mr. Musharraf is touring Europe with his family and plans to go to the United States on a lecture tour.

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