RAWALPINDI, Nov 10: Asif Zardari on Monday submitted an application before the division bench of Lahore High Court, Rawalpindi Bench, asking the court to summon the tapes in which former chief justice Lahore High Court, Rashid Aziz Khan, and Justice (retd) Malik Abdul Qayyum were recorded while talking to the then law minister Khalid Anwar.

Asif Zardari, who is arguing his appeal in person in Steel Mills case, stated that he wanted to show to the court that courts were pressured by Nawaz Sharif’s accountability bureau chief Saifur Rehman.

The court after hearing the arguments of Asif Zardari for about an hour adjourned the hearing till December 2.

Mr Zardari held that in his seven years’ incarceration, he had suffered from all kinds of ailments but his soul was intact, and that he would continue fighting.

He said that he was subjected to a worst kind of media trial, and added that when he was arrested from the Governor’s House on Nov 6, 1996, it was reported on the PTV that he was arrested with one ton of gold.

He said that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was tried in the courts in Punjab, and the same was being done to him. He said he would repeat what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had said before a court: “Neither is there an advocate nor an argument.”

He said that late Sajjad Hussain, chairman of Pakistan Steel Mills, was tortured by the Ehtesab Bureau of Saifur Rehman to become an approver in the case.

He referred to the petition filed by the wife of late Sajjad Hussain in the Sindh High Court in which she complained that her husband was being tortured to make a statement against Asif Ali Zardari.

Mr Zardari said that his life story was stranger than fiction. “I was in jail when Sajjad Hussain was murdered in Karachi, but I was nominated in the FIR for murdering Sajjad Hussain.”