Islamabad: Swiss authorities have handed former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband Senator Asif Zardari a six months' suspended sentence and fined them $ 50,000 each in a graft case, their lawyer announced in Islamabad on August 5.

Benazir could file an appeal against the order, the lawyer added. Farooq Naek, defence counsel of both Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari, issued the following statement.

The Swiss investigation officer Devaud on July 31, his last day in office, passed an order proving Bhutto and Zardari do not have Swiss billions although he did pass a minor suspended sentence of six months and a fine of $ 50, 000 each in the pre-shipment inspection case.

An elected official, investigating officer Devaud's tenure ended on July 31.

His order on the last day of office attempted to justify an inquiry that failed to find billions of corrupt dollars despite international publicity. The order diverts public attention from a politically motivated inquiry that could have resulted in a possible civil suit from the defendants who were wrongly alleged to have collected billions of dollars from corrupt practices.

Former Prime Minister Bhutto rejected the finding and cited the letter given her by a Swiss law officer that the disputed accounts were unrelated to her.

The undemocratic departure of the PPP (Pakistan Peoples Party) government in 1996 led to politically motivated charges against the Bhutto government.

Extremists fearing Bhutto's massive popular appeal alleged that the former Premier had amassed a fortune through corrupt means and moved Swiss government for disclosure. The Geneva Canton, investigating the Pakistani charges, claimed in 1997 that it had frozen Bhutto accounts.

Bhutto challenged the findings through her legal advisor who wrote to the Swiss Attorney General to provide him the details on which the release was issued so that the matter could be legally tackled.

As per the report of the law officer, the Swiss law Attorney General stated that none of the disputed accounts belonged to Bhutto. Following this admission by the Swiss Attorney General, Bhutto disassociated from the inquiry.

The inability to find the so-called billions of dollars is a great moral and political victory for the PPP and its supporters who all along contended that the charges of corruption were politically motivated. The technical order of the magistrate wherein he passed a minor suspended sentence as well as a minor fine are a major setback to the regime of General Musharraf as well as his predecessor that used huge amounts of state funds to bank roll the campaign against Bhutto and Zardari.

The lengths to which the regime went was proven when judges were blackmailed into rubber stamping a judgement written by the law ministry against Bhutto and Zardari in 1999. That judgement was set aside by the Supreme Court when tapes surfaced proving the perversion of justice through collusion of the law ministry, the investigative officers and the judges in the case.

Bhutto now demands a release of all correspondence between Devaud and the Pakistani regime claiming this will show that a Swiss elected official was drawn into a politically motivated campaign against her.

PPP sources asked the regime to apologise to the public for claiming wrongly that billions of dollars were stolen by the PPP leadership. The PPP called upon the regime to justify the amount of $100 million of state funds that belonged to the poor people of Pakistan which were spent on the persecution of the PPP leaders resulting in a minor technical sentence.

It is expected that both the disputed technical sentence and the minor fine will be set aside if the matter is appealed.

ANI