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Pakistan opposition's Khan held |
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Written by News Editor
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Wednesday, 14 November 2007 |
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LAHORE, Pakistan (CNN) -- Pakistani opposition leader Imran Khan was arrested in Lahore Wednesday during a student demonstration at a university campus, Lahore police said.
The development came as former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto remained under house arrest one day after calling for the first time on President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to completely give up power.
Musharraf later struck back in an interview with the New York Times, saying Bhutto had "no right" to ask him to step down.
He also questioned her popularity and her claim that she would win the elections, the article said.
"Let's start the elections and let's see whether she wins," Musharraf said, according to the newspaper.
The United States has been urging Musharraf to start those elections.
U.S. Deputy Security of State John Negroponte is expected to hold talks with Musharraf in Islamabad this week and press him to end the emergency rule imposed on November 3 and step down as military ruler.
U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson made a similar appeal to Musharraf, warning that such measures were setting back the country's moves toward democracy.
"The United States is urging your government not to throw away in weeks what it has taken years to achieve," she added.
While authorities barricaded the streets surrounding the house where Bhutto was staying, only a "handful" of officials and members of her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) had tried to breach the cordon, CNN's Karl Penhaul reported.
"These party officials show up to the barricades. They symbolically chant two or three slogans and then almost voluntarily they seem to be stepping into police vans to be taken off for some kind of arrest," Penhaul said.
"But certainly, there ... is no massing of party interests here and certainly, right now, there are many more police and, indeed, many more TV cameras than there are supporters of Benazir Bhutto."
Opposition groups had hoped to stage a five-day Lahore-to-Islamabad march and were counting on a groundswell of popular support to carry out the protest, but there appeared to be none.
Police and opposition officials reported the scattered burning of tires in Lahore to protest the barricades.
On Friday Bhutto was briefly confined to her villa compound in Islamabad in an effort to halt a massive opposition protest in Rawalpindi.
Musharraf has called the declaration of emergency rule necessary to crack down on Islamic terrorists massing strength in volatile tribal regions along the Afghan border. But the opposition sees the order as amounting to martial law and a power grab by Musharraf.
Pakistani authorities have shut down media outlets and jailed opposition leaders and lawyers who protested Musharraf's sacking of a number of Supreme Court justices, including Chief Justice Ikhtar Muhammed Chaudhry. |
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