Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was the elected prime minister of Pakistan until 1977, when the army chief he had appointed, Zia ul-Haq, removed him in a pre-dawn coup and put him on trial for the murder of a political opponent. He was hanged in Rawalpindi on April 4, 1979.¹ His government nationalized Pakistan's banks, among them United Bank Limited, founded by Agha Hasan Abedi, and the Kerry-Brown Senate report traced the founding of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) to Abedi's attempt to move beyond Bhutto's reach.²³

Nationalization and Abedi

Bhutto came to power after the war that separated East Pakistan as Bangladesh. The Senate report described Abedi as "just as cozy with Pakistani 'socialist' Ali Bhutto," the ideological opposite of Ayub Khan, whose government Abedi had cultivated at United Bank.²⁴ According to the report, from the time he took power Bhutto "was threatening to nationalize the banks, as he already had nationalized other sectors," and Abedi began the first steps toward forming BCCI as a Pakistani-managed bank outside Pakistan. "When Bhutto in turn learned about Abedi's attempt to circumvent his new socialist order, he not only went ahead with plans for nationalizing the United Bank, but promptly placed Abedi under house arrest." Abedi explained his plan for a global bank to Masihur Rahman, later BCCI's chief financial officer, while under house arrest.²

The report dated to 1972 the nationalization of a substantial portion of the businesses of the Saigol family, United Bank's principal shareholders. The banks themselves were taken by the Banks (Nationalization) Act, 1974 (Act XIX of 1974), which came into force at once and was "deemed to have taken effect on the 1st day of January, 1974," overriding any contrary law, contract or articles of association. Its schedule listed fourteen banks, including Habib Bank, where Abedi had begun his career, the National Bank of Pakistan, Muslim Commercial Bank and, as item ten, United Bank Limited.²³

The Senate report found that nationalization gave BCCI its founding staff, "a group of like-minded Pakistanis to operate the bank," who "were now widely available as a result of Bhutto's nationalization of their banks," and gave Pakistani businessmen such as the Saigols and the Gokal brothers "powerful motivation to find a bank that could not be controlled by the Pakistani government."²

Election Funds

In July 1978 Zia's government issued a White Paper on "The Conduct of the General Elections in March 1977." In its section on illegal funding of the campaign of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, it stated that "the other large source of funds was the money brought in by Agha Hasan Abdi [sic]," amounting to "two or three crores of rupees," and referred to Abedi's "travels . . . loaded as he used to be with bagfuls of money." The Senate report reproduced the White Paper in its hearing record and wrote that Zia "later executed Bhutto for financial crimes, in which Abedi, among others, was clearly involved."²⁴ The charge on which Bhutto was hanged was murder.¹⁵

Coup, Trial and Execution

In 1976 Bhutto appointed Zia chief of army staff over ten more senior officers. After three months of street fighting by anti-Bhutto rioters, Zia deposed him in 1977 and made himself president and chief martial law administrator.¹ Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who had been deputy defense minister under Bhutto, became Zia's minister of finance from 1977 to 1984.¹

On March 18, 1978, the Lahore High Court ordered Bhutto hanged for the murder of Nawab Mohammad Ahmad Khan. The Supreme Court of Pakistan rejected his appeal on February 6, 1979, and his review petition on March 24, 1979. On the evening of April 3, 1979, the superintendent of Rawalpindi jail read him the execution order, which stated that "the president of Pakistan has decided not to interfere in this matter." According to Lieutenant Colonel Rafiuddin, the jail's security officer, whose account appeared in his book Bhutto Kay Aakhri 323 Din, Bhutto objected that he had not been given 24 hours' notice, tried to write a will and burned the pages, and was carried to the scaffold on a stretcher. The executioner, Tara Masih, sprang the trap at four minutes past two on the morning of April 4. The body was taken to Chaklala air base and flown toward Jacobabad on a C-130; the first aircraft turned back with a fault after an hour and a second completed the flight.⁵ United Press International reported that the jail was a short walk from Zia's official residence.¹

Bhutto's daughter, Benazir Bhutto, returned from exile in April 1986 to oppose Zia and was regarded by her supporters as her father's political heir.¹