ISLAMABAD, July 7: People's Party Parliamentarians (PPP) has demanded of the government to withdraw all "false and fabricated" cases against jailed leader Asif Ali Zardari and Benazir Bhutto after Prime Minister Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain admitted that Mr Zardari was wrongly implicated in a drug case.

The demand was made by PPP leaders Makhdoom Amin Fahim, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, Raza Rabbani, Farhatullah Babar, Rukhsana Zuberi, Babar Awan, Munir Ahmed Khan and Sajjad Bukhari, while speaking at a news conference at Zardari House here on Wednesday.

Mr Fahim welcomed the statement made by Prime Minister Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain that the accountability process should be run under the judiciary. He expressed the hope that Mr Shujaat would take steps to bring the accountability process out of the military control.

Mr Fahim, who is also the chairman of Alliance for Restoration of Democracy (ARD), said the PPP praised the prime minister for speaking truth before the nation. He said Asif Zardari was a Pakistani citizen and had the right to get justice.

The PPP secretary-general, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, said when Chaudhry Shujaat was the interior minister, he had stated that the drug case against Mr Zardari was false. Again, he added, when Mr Shujaat had become the country's prime minister, he had issued the same statement.

Mr Ashraf asked the prime minister to withdraw the case, otherwise, the PPP would be right in thinking that there was a "real power" in the country which did not want to set Mr Zardari free.

Giving details of the cases against Mr Zardari, Babar Awan said the PPP leader was arrested on November 5, 1996, and since then he had been in a solitary confinement. He regretted that for the initial six months, Mr Zardari was not produced before any court and was kept in illegal custody.

Mr Awan said Mr Zardari was produced before an accountability court in Rawalpindi for the first time on April 22, 1997, in the Pakistan Steel Mills case. He said Mr Zardari had spent 5,640 days and nights in solitary confinement and celebrated 16 Eids without his children and wife. He said that Mr Zardari's issue had become a serious case of human rights violations.

Mr Awan said so far Asif Zardari had attended some 2,511 hearings in nine cases pending against him in various courts of Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore. He said during this period, Mr Zardari's mother and uncle died.

He said Mr Zardari had already been acquitted in five cases. Mr Awan said when Mr Zardari was granted bail in the drug case on March 15, 2002, the government filed BMW case against him within 15 minutes.

Mr Awan, who is the counsel for the jailed PPP leader, said for the first time in the past over one year, the full bench of the SC held hearing in the BMW case in which Justice Nawaz Abbasi, a former law secretary, refused to be included in the bench.

Giving details of the BMW case, Mr Awan said the car was sold by Barrister Zahid in London to a person Qayyum, who brought the car to Pakistan after paying Rs5.5 million as customs duty.

He said Mr Qayyum sold the car to Badaruddin and then the car was finally sold to Mr Saeed. He said Mr Zardari's name was nowhere in the case and even Barrister Zahid, who actually purchased the car in London, gave a statement before the court that he did not know Asif Zardari.

He claimed that the former director-general of Anti- Narcotics Force (ANF), Maj-Gen Mushtaq Hussain, had written a letter to the then interior minister, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, on October 19, 1997, in which he stated that Asif Zardari was not involved in the drug case and the Ehtesab Cell desired to register a case against Mr Zardari on political grounds.

The ANF DG asked the interior minister not to involve Mr Zardari in the case as it would dent the credibility of the organization, he added. Mr Awan said Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, being the chief executive of the country, could withdraw cases against Mr Zardari by using Section 494 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC).

He said in the past six months, some 1,101 cases under 16 MPO had been withdrawn in the Punjab by the provincial government. Similarly, in Karachi, some 600 cases had been withdrawn under the same section of the CrPC during the last five years, he added.