Pervez Musharraf wanted secret deal, says Nawaz Sharif

Islamabad: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has said that former dictator Pervez Musharraf had offered him a “secret deal” to return to the country from exile in Saudi Arabia to form a joint government in 2008.

At a meet of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz parliamentary committee on Tuesday, Mr Sharif said, “Musharraf wanted a secret deal with me in 2007”, according to a report in Dawn. “Musharraf offered me the deal directly, but I turned it down,” he said.

Mr Sharif said General Musharraf was willing to meet him and made several attempts to do so in the past. “But I declined.”

The revelation about the going-ons in Pakistan’s polity in 2007 has come for the first time from Mr Sharif, who at the time was living in Saudi Arabia after his government was toppled by General Musharraf in a coup in 1999.

Many members of the Sharif family too had to live in the Gulf nation after the coup until their return to Pakistan in November 2007.

“We left the country in a miserable condition and were not allowed to return for a long time,” Mr Sharif said, and made it clear he would do the same to General Musharraf, who left Pakistan last year for Dubai ostensibly for medical treatment.

“Now, Musharraf can’t come back to Pakistan, this is retribution,” Geo News quoted him as saying.

However, Mr Sharif’s claims were disputed by former Musharraf aide Ahmed Raza Kasuri.

“I have been working with General Musharraf for long and I have never heard any such thing,” he said.

Mr Kasuri said everyone knew that Mr Sharif went abroad under an agreement for 10 years and there could be no question that Mr Musharraf offered him a deal to form a government.

“It was, in fact, Nawaz Sharif who was begging to return to the country in 2007,” he said. “(The claim is) absolute rubbish and (a) bundle of lies, which has only been propagated for (Sharif’s) image-building that was badly affected due to his lies in the Panama scandal,” he said.