ISLAMABAD, Oct 27: An army veteran sent security men scurrying to protect President Pervez Musharraf when he stood up at the Eid prayers at Faisal Mosque on Wednesday and started haranguing the president.

Eyewitnesses told Dawn that no sooner the ex- armyman in a rear row began demanding that the president leave the mosque, security guards jumped to build a human wall around the president.

Security staff dragged away the man who asked the president to offer his prayers in the Army House instead in the company of his “uniformed colleagues”. His name could not be ascertained but he was said to be a former soldier belonging to Peshawar.

An official photograph of the president offering his prayers at the Faisal Mosque showed his security guards looking away in different directions as if in a state of high alert.

A senior government official told Dawn on condition of anonymity that the scare-man was “mentally retarded” and had been expelled from the army on the same grounds in 1998.

He was sent to Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences for check up but was neither taken into custody nor any case was registered against him, the official said.

Former senator Shahzad Waseem who stood close to the president in the first row however denied the whole episode to Dawn.

What happened according to him was that after the prayers a man approached President Musharraf bearing a written complaint against what he called police excesses. He said the complaint was received by the president’s staff.