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Pak parliamentarian in contact with Ijaz: Gilani
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said a Pakistani parliamentarian was in touch with Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz.
"There is an honourable member in this honourable House
whose name I do not want to take he is in touch with Mansoor
(Ijaz) from United States," Gilani said while speaking in the
Senate or upper house of parliament this evening.
"I don`t want to take his name. I have proofs. I know the
person who is in touch and that is the conspiracy against the
President," he said, without giving details.
Ijaz created a storm in Pakistan`s political and
diplomatic circles last month by releasing a secret memorandum
that he claimed he had drafted and sent to former US military
chief Admiral Mike Mullen on the instructions of former
Ambassador to the US, Husain Haqqani.
The alleged memo sought US help to help prevent a
military coup in Pakistan after the American military raid
that killed Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad
on May 2.
The memo further said the Pakistan government would carry
out a wide-ranging revamp of the security establishment to
flush out officials with links to militants.
Haqqani, who was forced to resign from his post, has
denied he was involved in drafting or delivering the memo.
Gilani has asked the Parliamentary Committee on National
Security to probe the "Memogate" scandal while the Supreme
Court has ordered a separate inquiry.
President Asif Ali Zardari, who has been at the centre of
the storm due to speculation that he was involved in the
matter, abruptly left Pakistan on December 6 to seek treatment
for a heart condition in Dubai.
In a related development, Ijaz told a TV news channel
that information provided to him by unidentified intelligence
sources had suggested that the Pakistan Army might have been
plotting a coup after the raid against bin Laden.
Ijaz claimed the intelligence sources had told him
Inter-Services Intelligence agency chief Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja
Pasha "had been travelling throughout the Arab world and other
countries after the Osama bin Laden raid" and that "in many
places he had explained there was a lot of stress in the
system because people could not understand who the blame
should be pinned on for the fact that bin Laden was on"
Pakistani soil.
He claimed that this "stress" suggested the possibility
of a coup by the Army.
Ijaz also told The Independent newspaper of Britain that
a US intelligence source had told him that "their information
was that Pasha had travelled to a few of the Arab countries to
talk about what would be necessary to do in the event they had
to remove Zardari from power and so forth".
PTI