ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s top court drew a line yesterday under a showdown with the government over corruption allegations against the president.

Since December 2009, the Supreme Court has insisted that the government re-open multi-million-dollar graft cases against Asif Ali Zardari in Switzerland that were frozen when he became head of state in 2008.

Earlier this year it convicted and dismissed Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani for refusing to ask Switzerland to re-open the cases, but the government appeared to back down last month by agreeing to write to the Swiss.

After weeks of wrangling over the wording, the Supreme Court yesterday approved a third draft of a letter to the Swiss authorities and asked for an update on the situation in four weeks, an AFP reporter said.

The government has long argued that it could not ask the Swiss to reopen the cases as the president has immunity from prosecution as head of state.

The allegations against Zardari date back to the 1990s, when he and his late wife, former premier Benazir Bhutto, are suspected of using Swiss banks to launder $12 million in alleged kickbacks.

Separately, a US drone strike targeting a militant compound killed five insurgents in a restive Pakistani tribal region near the Afghan border yesterday, security officials said.

The attack was the first since a massive anti-drone rally last weekend near the lawless region known as a stronghold of Taleban and Al-Qaeda militants, they said.

“Several US drones flew into the area before dawn and fired four missiles on a compound, killing five militants,” a security official told AFP after the strike in Hurmuz area, east of Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan tribal region.

Another security official in the northwestern city of Peshawar confirmed the attack and casualties.

The identities of those killed in the strike was not immediately clear.

The Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network in North Waziristan, blamed for some of the deadliest attacks in Afghanistan, is one of the thorniest issues between Islamabad and Washington.

The attacks by unmanned US aircraft remain contentious — they are deeply unpopular in Pakistan, which says they violate its sovereignty and fan anti-US sentiment, but American officials are said to believe they are too important to give up.

Imran Khan, Pakistan’s cricket hero turned politician, led thousands of supporters on a long drive from the capital Islamabad to the edge of the nearby tribal district of South Waziristan in a two-day protest against US drone strikes.

The rally was the first from a mainstream politician to the tribal belt described by US officials as one of the most dangerous place on Earth.