ISLAMABAD: Pakistan‘s former president Pervez Musharraf, whose 1999 military takeover of the then Nawaz Sharif government months after orchestrating the Kargil war set him up for a nine-year run as a player on the world stage, died Sunday in a Dubai hospital of the rare disease amyloidosis. He was 79.
New Delhi-born Musharraf, who was sentenced to death in absentia for treason in 2019, had been allowed to leave Pakistan three years earlier for medical treatment. The Pakistan mission in Dubai issued a no-objection certificate for his body to be taken back to the country for burial, consul general Hasan Afzal Khan said.
Both President Arif Alvi and PM Shehbaz Sharif expressed their condolences at Musharraf’s death, but foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari changed his Twitter profile to a photograph of his mother Benazir Bhutto, in whose assassination the former military strongman was named, and Nawab Akbar Bugti, a Baloch leader killed in a military offensive ordered by Musharraf.