KARACHI, March 20: The District and Sessions Judge (Central), Pir Ali Shah, on Saturday ordered the provincial health secretary to immediately constitute a medical board to ascertain if Asif Ali Zardari , the interned husband of former premier Benazir Bhutto, needed a seven-week bed rest.

The order was issued on the application of Special Public Prosecutor, Maula Bux Bhutto, who brought in question the certificates issued by Mr Zardari's doctors confining him to the bed for seven weeks.

The prosecutor had contended that the opinion of the doctors and the surgeon who conducted Mr Zardari's operation was conflicting, confusing and ambiguous.

He had requested the court to order setting up of a medical board to ascertain if the accused needed such a bed rest.

The court also ordered that, if necessary, the surgeon who conducted the laser surgery could be included in the medical board.

Asif Zardari, along with three co-accused Akhtar Javed Pirzada, Bilal Shaikh and Babar Sindhu, is facing the charge of double murder in the case.

Justice Nizam Ahmed of the Sindh High Court, and his son Nadim Ahmed, a lawyer, were shot dead in an attack on June 10, 1996 outside their house in PECHS area Karachi. The complainant, Group Captain (r) Sikandar, brother-in-law of Justice Nizam Ahmed, hadlodged the FIR of the incident with Ferozabad police station.

The killings were attributed to a dispute over a plot adjacent to Awami Markaz as Justice Nizam Ahmed had opposed commercialization and illegal allotment of the plot which was stated to be purchased by Javed Akhtar Pirzada as a front man of the ex-Senator, Asif Ali Zardari.

BAIL GRANTED: The Additional District and Sessions Judge, Malir, Abdul Kabir Leghari, granted bail to two accused in the murder of an eight-year-old boy.