ISLAMABAD, 22 August — Police yesterday arrested the secretary-general of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) on corruption charges, officials said.
Jahangir Badar, petroleum and religious affairs minister in Benazir’s 1988-90 and 1993-96 governments, was arrested in the eastern city of Lahore on the orders of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB).
“He has been taken into custody on charges of corruption and corrupt practices during his stint in the governments,” NAB official Amin Jan Marwat said.
“The initial investigations reveal that the accused accumulated assets and misused authority during his ministerial tenures,” an NAB statement said.
“He owned shares in various hotels in Lahore besides shares in various properties, hotels and petrol pumps located in Dubai, Toronto and the USA,” it said.
Marwat said the politician would be tried by a special court set up by the NAB, the military government’s tough anti-corruption body. The PPP denounced the arrest and demanded Badar’s immediate release.
“The PPP demands an end to the sham of the so-called accountability drive directed solely against a class of politicians opposed to the regime,” the party said in a statement. “It also demands the immediate release of Jahangir Badar and other leaders held on trumped-up charges.”
Scores of people, including senior politicians and bureaucrats, have been punished for corruption since President Pervez Musharraf seized power in a coup in 1999.
Benazir has lived in self-imposed exile since leaving the country shortly before her 1998 conviction for corruption.
Earlier this year the Supreme Court found the case against her was rigged and ordered a retrial.
