Former dictator General (r) Pervez Musharraf on Friday rejected the claim of American lobbyist Mark Siegel that Benazir Bhutto received threatening phone calls from Musharraf.
“I strongly and unequivocally reject the claim of Mark Siegel, a close adviser, paid lobbyist and co-author of the last book of the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. 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 willfully fabricated,” Musharraf said in his message on a social media website.
“Besides meeting Ms. Bhutto twice in UAE,” Musharraf continued, “I only spoke to her once in my life on the phone after she had returned to Pakistan in October 2007. In that conversation, I shared with Ms. Bhutto, intelligence information that was conveyed to me personally by the leadership in UAE, indicating suicide bombers were planning an attack against her.”
Musharraf said that he found the testimony of Siegel despicable and that it could not be further from the truth. He said that he not only resented the implications, but found them to be libelous 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 inquire 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,” Musharraf said.
“It is also widely known in the public domain,” Musharraf said, “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 General Hamid Gul, Brigadier Ejaz Shah, and Chaudhary Pervaiz Elahi. If I had also threatened her, I wonder why she would write to me to solicit protection from these gentlemen. 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.”
Musharraf said that he believed that the truth would ultimately prevail, justice would be served, and that these “politicized” charges against him would be discarded by the courts.
