Lahore: Assassinated opposition leader Benazir Bhutto's husband warned that he could call for protests in troubled Pakistan if vote fraud denies his party victory in next week's elections.

Asif Ali Zardari, who became caretaker leader of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) after she was slain in a suicide attack, told AFP at his fortified Lahore home that he was confident the PPP would form the next government.

But he said the lack of impartiality of Pakistan's election commission meant Monday's polls would be "pre-rigged", and cautioned that if electoral violations robbed PPP of victory, supporters could take to the streets in a country already thrown into turmoil by his wife's violent death.

"We will call for all the political forces to get together, and together we shall decide how to take the people to the streets, how to do political agitation enough to get our point of view across," he said in an interview late yesterday.

"We will look at it when the time comes -- all options are open to political forces, always," the 51-year-old added. Zardari wears the crown of one of Pakistan's most prominent political outfits after his wife's death in a bomb and gun attack at a campaign rally on December 27,which the government blamed on an Al-Qaeda-linked warlord.

Two-time prime minister Bhutto had named her husband as her political heir but he and the party decided the couple's 19-year-old son Bilawal should lead it instead. Zardari is at the helm until Bilawal finishes at Oxford University.

Source : PTI