LONDON, 2 September 2007 — Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said yesterday that power-sharing talks with President Gen. Pervez Musharraf were at a standstill, but that she planned to return to the nation even without a deal.

Benazir told a news conference in London that no agreement had been reached due to apparent opposition from members of Pakistan’s ruling regime to working with her Pakistan People’s Party.

However, she said it was important that she end her exile and return home. Her party will announce the date on Sept. 14, she said. “I will be going back to Pakistan very soon, but the date is going to be announced from the soil of Pakistan,” Benazir said.

In Pakistan, ruling party officials immediately said Benazir would face charges related to corruption allegations if she returned. After serving as prime minister in the 1990s, Benazir left in 1999 to avoid arrest after her government collapsed amid allegations of corruption and misrule.

Benazir did not give details of what had stalled the talks aimed at shoring up Musharraf’s fraught re-election bid and allowing her to return to Pakistan to contest parliamentary elections.

However, she has yet to win a public commitment from Musharraf on two critical points — that he would step down as army chief and give up the power to dismiss the government and Parliament.

“We understand that there is severe reaction within the present ruling party to any understanding with the Pakistan People’s Party,” Benazir said. “Due to that reaction no understanding has been arrived at and we are making our own plans to return to the country.” Benazir said Wednesday that Musharraf had agreed to step down as military chief before presidential elections, which will take place in either September or October.

However, the New York Times reported on its website Friday night that the president of Pakistan’s ruling party and one of Musharraf’s closest allies, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, said the president would not resign from his post as army chief before the presidential elections, but would do so before parliamentary elections scheduled for early January.

He told the Times in an interview that Musharraf would run for re-election as president while still in uniform.

In Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, Musharraf’s spokesman declined to comment about Benazir’s news conference yesterday. But Azim Chaudhry, a senior member of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q party’s central executive council, blamed Benazir for the failure of the talks, saying “she was asking for too many concessions.”

“Our party was not ready to allow a corrupt politician like her to return to Pakistan and take part in politics against us,” he told The Associated Press. “She wanted that the president should not have the power to dissolve the Parliament. She wanted that we should scrap corruption cases against her, and this is what we didn’t accept.”

Chaudhry said Benazir would have to face the law after her return to Pakistan.

However, Railway Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, a close aide to Musharraf, maintained there was still hope for success in talks between Benazir and the government.

Benazir had set Aug. 31 as the deadline by which her party needed clear concessions from Musharraf if negotiations were to continue in an effort to put pressure on the government to accede to her demands. She told reporters she had not heard directly from Musharraf’s camp since meeting with them in London earlier this week to lay out proposals for a possible pact.

However, she understood from Pakistani media reports that Musharraf’s officials had agreed to 80 percent of her party’s demands, but some government ministers remained reluctant.

Benazir’s spokesman Farhatullah Babar in Pakistan suggested on Friday her party could only allow government envoys a little more time to respond or see the tentative deal collapse.

Any collapse of the Benazir-Musharraf talks would likely alarm Pakistan’s Western backers, including the United States, which is hoping the next government will maintain Pakistan’s efforts against the Taleban and Al-Qaeda.

Benazir is trying to convince voters and skeptics in her own party that Musharraf’s support among the military and international community means he still has a role to play. Musharraf, who has governed Pakistan virtually unchallenged for eight years after he seized power in 1999, now finds himself in a three-way fight for power with Benazir and Nawaz Sharif, the man he deposed in a bloodless coup.