Contradictory claims were made in the Supreme Court by former ISI chief Asad Durrani and former army chief Gen Aslam Beg, with the former in a sworn statement conceding that he had received instructions from the latter for the disbursement of election donations and Gen Beg declaring the revelations by Younus Habib as a bolt from the blue.

“This is totally mala fide attempt to dramatise and scandalise the sanctity of the proceedings pending before the court, which has given a new direction by the sinister intelligence behind this whole affair,” Aslam Beg said in his counter-affidavit. He said it was also part of the record that Interior Minister Rehman Malik travelled twice to Germany to scandalise the issue, which was first blasted by late Maj-Gen (retd) Naseerullah Babar, the interior minister in Benazir Bhutto’s second government.

Asad Durrani admitted that he had received instructions from Gen Beg that a section of the business community in Karachi had raised some contribution to support the election campaign of IJI and he could arrange it for distribution under a formula to be conveyed later by the election cell set up at the president’s office.

“As already stated, there is no political cell in the ISI. However, political work could be done by some designated persons,” he said, adding that he was not aware of the Mehran Bank scandal in 1994, but since he had been asked only to provide details of Rs140 million spent in the election, he never tried to find out under whose instructions the amount was collected from the business community.

Mr Durrani took full responsibility of the operation, but said the ISI as an institution was kept out of all this.

Advocate Akram Sheikh, the counsel for Gen Aslam Beg, admitted the existence of the political cell created under an executive order of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1975, the presence of which was unwarranted and an interference in the fundamental rights of people guaranteed under Article 17 of the Constitution.

“This court can declare that no such political cell be allowed to continue in security agencies,” he said, adding that the petitioner had also confined himself to the extent of existence of the political cell in ISI, as was evident from his letters addressed to the court.