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Pakistani lawyer arrested 24 hours after being freed

"One of the plainclothes guys had a pump action shotgun. He put it on my chest, pumped it and said, `I will shoot you.'"

Ali Ahsan, son of lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan

For 24 hours on Friday, the leader of Pakistan's lawyers movement was a free man.

Aitzaz Ahsan, a Cambridge-educated lawyer who is the president of the country's Supreme Court Bar Association, was freed from house arrest early on Friday. He began his day by announcing plans to mount nationwide protests if the country's Supreme Court was not restored to power by February. His day ended with the Pakistani police hurling him into the back of a police truck and threatening to shoot his son.

"One of the plainclothes guys had a pump action shotgun," said his son, 31-year-old Ali Ahsan. "He put it on my chest, pumped it and said, `I will shoot you.'"

Ahsan is considered one of the most skilled political opponents of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. This spring, Ahsan masterminded a series of legal challenges and protests by lawyers that resulted in the reinstatement of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, several months after Musharraf had suspended him on ethics charges.

A longtime member of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's political party, Ahsan deftly turned Chaudhry's suspension into a multiparty political movement calling for an independent judiciary in Pakistan.

On Nov. 3, days before Chaudhry's court was expected to rule that Musharraf was ineligible for a third term in office, he declared a state of emergency and placed 13 of the country's 17 Supreme Court justices under house arrest, as well as Ahsan.

Then early on Friday government officials released Ahsan from house arrest for three days to celebrate Id al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice, one of Islam's most important holidays.

Emerging from his home that morning, Ahsan met with judges who had also been detained and mocked Musharraf to reporters.

"He announced he is going to sue Musharraf for libel for two billion rupees [US$33 million]," his son said.

On Friday night, Ahsan set out for Islamabad to meet Chaudhry, who remains under house arrest.

As Ahsan waited in a highway rest stop outside Islamabad at 1am yesterday, police officers approached him, his son said. They dragged him toward a nearby police truck as three others pointed guns at him.

After seven hours in the back of the police truck, Ahsan was returned to his home in Lahore, placed back under house arrest and barred from giving interviews.
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