more coverage on ass-slum beg...may he and his cronies get court martialed
Soldier of misfortune Analysis By Khaled Ahmed
Beg's lateral thinking on drugs
Ardeshir Cowasjee (Dawn 21 July 2002) reveals that in 1991 Aslam Beg and Asad Durrani met Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and told him that funds for vital on-going covert operations were drying up, but they had a foolproof plan to generate money by dealing in drugs. They asked for his permission to associate themselves with the drug trade, assuring him of full secrecy and no chance of any trail leading back to them.
In 1988, General Zia removed the Junejo government under Section 58-2B. The Supreme Court found that the president had wrongfully dismissed the government, but it didn't restore it. Years later, ex-COAS General Aslam Beg revealed that he had sent a message to chief justice Zullah through chairman Senate Wasim Sajjad ordering the Court not to restore the Junejo government. When a contempt petition against the ex-COAS was brought before the Court, once again the Court visibly shied away from proceeding against him, and the rumour was that the GHQ had interceded for Aslam Beg.
Beg's proliferation
Washington-based journalist Khalid Hasan writing in Daily Times (11 November 2004) quoted a New Republic article referring to a statement made by Dr AQ Khan that Aslam Beg, army chief from 1988 to 1991, had authorised the sale of Pakistan's nuclear weapons' technology to other states.
General Zia died in an air-crash in 1988 and the man first accused of having planned it was Zia's chief of staff, Aslam Beg, who acted in a strange manner after the crash. He declined to sit in the plane that was hit, then changed his statements about where he went after the crash and who had actually killed Zia. Zia's son, Ijazul Haq, who was in the Nawaz Sharif government after the 1990 election, kept accusing Aslam Beg of having killed his father - till many years later he changed his line to accuse the Americans like everyone else.
Beg and AQ Khan
London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, issued its report Nuclear Black Markets: Pakistan, AQ Khan and the Rise of Proliferation Networks, in 2007. It noted: In 2000, when General Pervez Musharraf ordered his National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to inquire into the affairs of Dr AQ Khan, NAB relied on an earlier investigation carried out under Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif by the ISI in 1998-1999 to confirm that Khan was buying too much material for Pakistan's own programme and that he had given a house to General Beg and was paying off numerous Pakistani journalists and even funding a newspaper.
Zahid Hussain, Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam, Columbia University Press, New York, 2007, p.166, states: Nawaz Sharif's finance minister Ishaq Dar disclosed that 'Beg came back from Tehran with an offer of $5 billion in return for nuclear know-how, but Sharif rejected the offer'.
Weekly Karachi magazine Takbeer printed a report in 1992 which reads like a 'leak' from the post-Aslam Beg military leadership. The report was published in the 20 August 1992 issue under the title Saaniha Bahawalpur main chand A'la Fauji Afsar Mulawwis hein (Some High-ranking Army Officers are involved in the Bahawalpur Tragedy). Its editor Salahuddin was later mysteriously killed in Karachi.
Beg and 'Takbeer' revelations
About General Zia's death in an air-crash in Bahawalpur, it noted: When Zia asked Beg to return to Islamabad with him in his C-130, Beg said he had to go to Lahore on some other mission. This statement he gave on 19 August 1988. But on 25 August he told some officers that he actually had to go to Multan and therefore had declined to go with Zia. But the log book of his plane mentioned no planned trips to either Multan or Lahore on the page-entry for 17 August. On 18 August 1988, in the presence of some American officials, Beg stated that Zia had been killed by Russian KGB, Indian RAW and Afghan Khad working in tandem. After a few days, meeting the dead chief's family, he accused the Americans of having killed him!