PML-Q not involved in Benazir murder: Raja Riaz

Riaz claims ex-foreign minister quit not over Davis but removal from post.

LAHORE: A senior leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party in Punjab has defended ally Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid against allegations leveled by PPP dissident former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

“Intelligence agencies have cleared the position of the PML-Q leadership in the assassination case of [former prime minister] Benazir Bhutto,” Leader of the Opposition in the Punjab Assembly Raja Riaz told a press conference at the assembly’s cafeteria on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Qureshi said that he had opposed PPP’s alliance with the PML-Q over the Quaid league’s alleged involvement in the December 2007 murder of Bhutto.

Taking a jibe at Qureshi, who had said that Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani had been a part of military dictator Ziaul Haq’s regime, Riaz said that Qureshi himself had often stayed at the Islamabad residence of former president General (retired) Pervez Musharraf and still enjoyed a close friendship with him.

Rubbishing Qureshi’s claim that he had quit because he was pressured into releasing American national Raymond Davis, Riaz said he had only quit because the foreign ministry was taken away from him. “For the past one year, Qureshi had been lobbying to become prime minister but the president refused,” he claimed.

Meanwhile, sources close to the prime minister’s camp in Multan told The Express Tribune that the PPP leadership has decided to field the prime minister’s son Ali Musa Gilani as a candidate on NA-148, the constituency of Qureshi and PML-N’s Javed Hashmi.

Qureshi has won all but one general election (1997) from this seat against Hashmi.

The prime minister had earlier planned to nominate Ali Musa Gilani, who completed his masters from the UK in 2009, for a National Assembly seat in Lodhran.

(with additional reporting by owais jafri in multan)

Published in The Express Tribune, November 17^th, 2011.