Ayub Khan

Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan was a Pakistani army officer who became the first Pakistani commander-in-chief of the Pakistan Army in January 1951 and later ruled the country as president. Agha Hasan Abedi, later founder of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), cultivated his government from the founding of United Bank in 1959.¹²

Army

Ayub Khan was commissioned as an officer in the British Indian Army in 1928. In January 1951 he was appointed the first Pakistani commander-in-chief of the army.¹

United Bank and BCCI

When United Bank was formed in 1959, Abedi appointed as chairman of its board I. I. Chundrigar, a former prime minister whom the Kerry-Brown Senate report called "a close confidante of Pakistani's then current prime minister, Ayub Khan." The report continued: "Abedi maintained close ties to Khan's government, later hiring General Khan's minister of information to become the 'publisher' of a BCCI promotional magazine, 'South.'" The report did not name the minister. After the separation of East Pakistan, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, the report said Abedi became "just as cozy with Pakistani 'socialist' Ali Bhutto, Khan's ideological opposite."²

Death

Ayub Khan died of a heart attack at his residence in Islamabad at 12:15 in the afternoon of April 20, 1974, aged 67. He had suffered from heart trouble for over eight years, "since the last days of his rule as President," had gone to the United States for an operation about two and a half years earlier, and had been admitted to the Combined Military Hospital in Rawalpindi about a month before his death. His wife, Begum Ayub Khan, and a daughter, Begum Nasim Aurangzeb, were at his bedside; his youngest son, Tahir Ayub, who reached the house ten minutes later, said that "he was speaking quite all right till almost the end and did not complain of any pain." His body was taken to his ancestral village, Rehana, for burial.¹