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Islamabad: Pakistan yesterday deported former prime minister Nawaz Sharif to Saudi Arabia after his dramatic return from exile, averting a potentially serious political challenge to the leadership of President Pervez Musharraf.
About four hours after he arrived in Islamabad on a Pakistan International Airlines flight from London, Sharif was arrested and put on a special plane to Jeddah.
Amid the airport drama, police blocked the roads to airports in Islamabad and Rawalpindi and battled political workers with teargas and batons, arresting hundreds of people, including leaders of parties that form the All Parties Democratic Alliance (APDM).
Pakistan’s ruling party president Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain said that the decision to deport Sharif was taken on the insistence of Saudi Arabia.
"King Abdullah had written a letter to President Pervez Musharraf. There was a decision not to deport him but it was changed because of Saudi insistence," he said in a talk show on private Geo television channel.
The Pakistan Muslim League (PML) president dismissed suggestions that the United States was behind the deportation move.
Call for protest
He said prior to Sharif’s arrival the PML and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz had recommended to Musharraf that the former prime minister should not be expelled and that "we are capable of facing him politically."
In London, Nawaz’s son Hasan Sharif, said his father was "disappointed" to have been deported from his homeland, but will go back to Pakistan "as soon as he can".
"He is a very courageous man. Everybody witnessed what he did today," he told Sky News television. "It’s a bad day in the history of Pakistan," he added, but said: "Mr Musharraf, make no mistake about it, he will be back."
In Washington, a White House spokesman described the deportation as an "internal matter" but noted that upcoming elections should be "free and fair."
Earlier, the PIA jet carrying Sharif, whose younger brother Shahbaz stayed back in London in a last-minute tactical decision, landed at the airport at 9am.
He remained in the aircraft for 90 minutes as security and immigration officials unsuccessfully tried to make him hand over his passport, witnesses said.
Later he alighted from the aircraft and was taken to the VIP lounge where an anti-graft National Accountability Bureau official read out "grounds for his arrest".
He was taken into custody and taken to a special plane standing by with engines running to fly Sharif to Jeddah, where he spent seven years after he was banished to the kingdom in December 2000 under a deal brokered by the Saudis.
PML-N lawyers immediately filed a petition in the Supreme Court against "naked violation" of its August 23 verdict that upheld the "inalienable right" of the Sharif brothers to return and remain in the country. The APDM announced a countrywide protest today.
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