ISLAMABAD - After days of mysterious silence, the Foreign Office on Friday rejected as speculative and total fabrication an article in a leading UK-based English newspaper Financial Times, which claimed that within a week after May 2 covert US military raid to kill al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, President Asif Ali Zardari sought the Obama administration’s help to stop army chief General Ashfaq Kayani from staging a coup against his government. Referring to some articles in the press about a purported message sent to Washington through a private individual, Foreign Office spokeswoman Tehmina Janjua said the original article in the Financial Times about the so-called message was a total fabrication and the subsequent comments unwarranted, speculative and unnecessary. “The idea of employing a private individual to convey a message to a foreign government, circumventing established official channels of communication, defies belief,” she said in a press statement.
She said the insinuations and assertions in the fictitious story were devoid of any credence and were emphatically rejected. In an opinion piece in the Financial Times, US-based businessman Mansoor Ijaz wrote that a senior Pakistani diplomat telephoned him with an urgent request early on May 9, exactly a week after the raid against bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. “Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s president, needed to communicate a message to White House national security officials that would bypass Pakistan’s military and intelligence channels. The embarrassment of bin Laden being found on Pakistani soil had humiliated Zardari’s weak civilian government to such an extent that the president feared a military takeover was imminent,” Ijaz wrote.
He wrote, “He (Zardari) needed an American fist on his army chief’s desk to end any misguided notions of a coup and fast.” It was well over two weeks that the Financial Times made a claim about the president seeking help of the Obama administration against the possible military coup but there was no word of denial by the Foreign Office until now. President’s spokesman Farhatullah Babar had though denied the contents of Financial Times article few days after it appeared.
The memo allegedly sent by President Zardari promised that the ‘S-Section’ of the ISI will be eliminated and a new national security team will be inducted. It sought direct intervention of the US army to pressurise the Pakistan Army and hinted that a coup could be staged against the civilian government.
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