ISLAMABAD, May 28: A hectic round of meetings is continuing here since Tuesday night between the top leadership of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal and the president’s representatives.

The first meeting was held on Tuesday night and the deliberations continued for about four hours and a half on the terms and conditions of the religio-political alliance for ending the impasse on the Legal Framework Order (LFO), informed sources claimed.

From the MMA side the talks were attended by the alliance’s president Maulana Shah Ahmed Noorani, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, Maulana Fazlur Rahman and Liaqat Baloch while the president’s team included PML(Q) chief Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, Tariq Aziz and three top bosses of a sensitive agency.

The second round was in progress on Wednesday evening till filing of this report.

MMA’s Liaqat Baloch said the stand of the alliance had already been submitted to the government in written form, and that the MMA would not budge from its publicly stated position on the issues involved.

The sources claimed that the MMA leaders might be called to the army house any time for a meeting with President Musharraf after the key hurdles are cleared. “The process is at make-or-break stage as things have started looking really bad for the government following the breakout of the LFO-related rumpus in the Punjab Assembly, the bastion of the Chaudhry brothers (Shujaat and Pervez) who are completely sold to the idea of the president donning the military uniform for the next five years, sources told Dawn.

The government is of the view that it can handle the MMA more easily than the rest of the opposition as, according to the ruling alliance, the former has bigger stakes in the system: it is heading the NWFP government and sharing power in Balochistan, the sources said.

They told Dawn that the deliberations centred round a time-frame for the president to relinquish the army post, with the government side wanting a ‘reasonable’ time period and the MMA team insisting on August 14 as the cutaway date.

When reached for his comments on the meeting, MMA’s Qazi Hussain Ahmed refused to say anything about the deliberations. He said: “It (the reports of such meetings) is the invention of some newspapers only.”

Allama Sajid Naqvi, the head of one of the six MMA component parties, told Dawn that the alliance was given a signal before the meeting that the president might be given at least two years for quitting the COAS office. He, however, said that the MMA leadership was of considered opinion that it should not go beyond August 14 next.

The MMA leadership, the sources said, maintained the same stand at the combined opposition parties’ meeting where the consensus was that he should not even be allowed to continue wearing the army cap up to August 14 next. Liaqat Baloch said Prime Minister Jamali and PML(Q) president “have the pivotal role” in ending the constitutional crises.