Bhutto out after house arrest

With President Gen. Pervez Musharraf under increasing U.S. pressure to fully restore democracy, Bhutto appeared unbowed by her brief detention — she announced plans to defy a ban on public gatherings and lead her supporters on a 300-kilometer (185-mile) march this week.

“When the masses combine, the sound of their steps will suppress the sound of military boots,” Bhutto told around 100 journalists protesting a new media clampdown.

Musharraf insists he called the week-old emergency to help fight Islamic extremists who control swathes of territory near the Afghan border. But the main targets of his subsequent crackdown in this nation of 160 million people have been his most outspoken critics, including the increasingly independent courts and media.

Thousands of people have been arrested, TV news stations taken off air, and judges removed. On Saturday, three reporters from Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper were ordered to leave Pakistan for an editorial in the paper that used an expletive in an allusion about Musharraf, said Deputy Information Minister Tariq Azim.

The moves have prompted sharp criticism from the United States, his chief international backer, and Musharraf last week said that parliamentary elections initially slated for January would be held no more than a month later, dispelling speculation the vote could be delayed by as long as year.

Attorney General Malik Mohammed Qayyum told The Associated Press on Saturday that the state of emergency would “end within one month.” He provided no further details and would not say when a formal announcement might come.

But authorities eased the clampdown on Bhutto, a former prime minister, and her supporters, thousands of whom were rounded up ahead of a major rally she had planned to hold Friday near Islamabad.

A heavy security cordon thrown around Bhutto’s Islamabad villa to keep her from going to the rally was lifted Saturday morning and she was allowed to leave, meeting first with party colleagues and then addressing the small journalists’ protest.

But dozens of helmeted police blocked her white, bulletproof Land Cruiser when she tried to visit Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, the independent-minded chief justice who was removed from his post following Musharraf’s state of emergency.

Speaking through a loudspeaker, Bhutto said Taliban and al-Qaida-linked militants were gaining ground in the country’s turbulent northwest. She also said Musharraf’s military-led government was about to crumble.

“This government is standing on its last foot,” she said, as dozens of supporters scuffled briefly with police. “This government is going to go.”

Bhutto said earlier in the day that she would lead a march Tuesday from the city of Lahore, in eastern Pakistan, to Islamabad.

Her jubilant homecoming procession last month in the southern city of Karachi after eight years of exile was marred by twin suicide bombings. She escaped unharmed, but more than 145 people died in the attack, blamed on Islamic militants.

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