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ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan People’s Party came out on Sunday with a detailed reply to the allegations levelled by American businessman of Pakistani origin, Mansoor Ijaz, against President Asif Ali Zardari during the hearing by the memo commission and termed them ‘self-contradictory’.
But the reply has come from former federal minister and frontline PPP leader Raja Pervez Ashraf and has been issued through a spokesman of the presidency.
Mr Ashraf said in a statement: “Contradictions in the statements of Mansoor Ijaz had totally exposed the ‘farce’ and the elements who agitated the so-called memo case in a desperate bid to upset the political applecart before the Senate elections which was bound to give a qualitative political edge to the government.
“Now that Senate elections have been held successfully and contradictions in Mansoor Ijaz’s statement also exposed it was the moral responsibility of these elements to apologise to the people for dragging them in a reckless political controversy that only cast a dim light on our political maturity.”
The PPP leader said that since the matter was before the commission he would not like to comment on its proceedings.
He said Mr Ijaz, who had claimed that the then ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani ‘dictated’ the memo to him and that he acted only as a ‘stenographer’ and a ‘typist’, now has changed his stance and said that he himself wrote the first draft.
“But when confronted with the obvious contradiction Ijaz once again changed his previous statement that he wrote the memo himself but he did so under Haqqani’s instructions.”
Mr Ashraf said Mr Ijaz also failed to explain why he was so keen to take dictation from Mr Haqqani and act as his steno when he was unable to reach out to Mr Haqqani who, according to him, was inaccessible to him.
He said when Mr Ijaz failed to provide hard evidence in support of his claims he started talking about phone calls which he said had taken place between him and Mr Haqqani.
“When this claim too was countered Ijaz then asserted that he received a phone call from Haqqani on either the 15th or 16th of October from an anonymous number,” he added.
“It was surprising that the man who claimed to possess incontrovertible evidence in the form of telephone bills and Blackberry data neither recalled whether the call was made on 15th or 16th October nor had any evidence about the identity of the caller.”
