Pakistan:Pakistan's political crisis deepened yesterday when President Pervez Musharraf and his main rival, Benazir Bhutto, dismissed the possibility of a powersharing deal.
General Musharraf said on television last night that he would not allow Ms Bhutto or his other rival, Nawaz Sharif, to return from exile before parliamentary polls later this year. "No, they will not be returning before elections," he said.
Speculation over a deal between Gen Musharraf and Ms Bhutto, who fled Pakistan in 1999 amid corruption allegations, has been rife. In return for an amnesty, Ms Bhutto - who controls the country's most powerful party, the Pakistan People's Party - had offered to share power with the general. But she ruled out cohabitation after Musharraf supporters rampaged through Karachi last weekend shooting rivals. "With 42 people dead, I cannot envisage such a thing at this moment," she told the Christian Science Monitor.
This appears to close off another exit for Gen Musharraf from the crisis triggered by his removal of the chief justice of the supreme court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, in March. The judge's refusal to resign - the first senior civilian to defy Gen Musharraf since he seized power in 1999 - triggered a political earthquake. Mr Chaudhry has led a spirited campaign for reinstatement and is an unlikely unifier of the notoriously fractious opposition.
Pro-Chaudhry rallies have drawn huge crowds, most recently in Lahore, the heartland of military rule. Opposition parties spanning secular liberals and Islamist clerics have rallied behind him with the exception of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), a Karachi-based party with a history of thuggery.
Gen Musharraf appears increasingly authoritarian and the crisis has taken some sinister twists. Last weekend in Karachi 15,000 police and soldiers failed to intervene as armed MQM gangs blocked roads and shot the chief justice's supporters.
On Monday, Hamad Raza, a supreme court official close to Mr Chaudhry, was shot dead in his Islamabad home.
Yesterday Shakil Turabi, a news agency editor, said he was dragged from his car in Islamabad by suspected intelligence agents and beaten for "writing against the government".
- (Guardian service)