ISLAMABAD, June 15: Former prime minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali surprised the National Assembly on Friday by telling it during budget debate that he and his family members were missing from new voters’ list, strengthening opposition complaints about attempted manipulation of electoral rolls.

Mr Jamali, who resigned from the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (PML) early this month after differences with party leaders, also proposed the determination of a constitutional role for the military, on the fourth day of the debate once interrupted by frayed tempers when an opposition member accused a government minister of threatening to kill him.

In the beginning of the first of the two house sittings held on Friday to debate the federal budget, the former prime minister appeared to see somebody’s desire to have him out of contest in the next elections by getting his and his son’s names omitted, along with those of other members of the family, from the newly-prepared voters’ list for his constituency in Balochistan.

“If you want I should not contest the election, I will not and will not die (because of that),” he said and, in a reference to his forced resignation from office in June 2004, added: “I am not prime minister for three years and I have not died.”

Mr Jamali gave no hint of who might want him out of the electoral contest, but he accused PML’s president Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and secretary-general Mushahid Hussain of running the party ‘dictatorially’ as he referred to a reported statement by Mr Syed that there would have been no judicial crisis over the presidential reference against Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry if the two party leaders had been consulted beforehand.

The former premier also said the constitution could be amended if the political parties so wanted and proposed that in that process “the role of the armed forces should be determined once for all” to avoid the possibility of future takeovers. PPP member Qurban Ali Shah accused States and Frontier Regions Minister Sardar Mohammad Rind of threatening to kill him after an exchange of angry remarks between two ministers and as many PPP members over a denied press report linking Information Technology Minister Awais Ahmed Leghari with a Pakistan-origin Canadian woman, Kafila Siddiqi, found dead last week at an Islamabad home she shared with Minister of State for Communications Shahid Jamil Qureshi, who later resigned from his office over the affair.

While Mr Leghari was not present in the house, Mr Rind, Food and Agriculture Minister Sikandar Hayat Bosan and Minister of State for Finance Omar Ayub Khan rejected the report as untrue after the matter was raised by PPP’s chief whip Khurshid Ahmed Shah, quoting the newspaper report.

The row died down but erupted again a few minutes later after the chair disposed of a query about an MQM reference seeking disqualification of the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf (PTI) chief, Imran Khan.

Mr Qurban Ali Shah complained about some remarks he said Mr Rind had made to him while passing by his desk and added: “He threatened to kill me.”The PPP member ran past several rows of desks towards the rostrum to protest and said he would move a motion for breach of his privilege.

The matter seemed to have ended after the speaker expunged the ministerial remarks to which the two PPP members had objected and called for avoiding mutual recriminations, and Mr Qurban Ali Shah later made a cool speech to criticise the new budget though he complained that police had stopped his car for half an hour on way to the National Assembly because of an impending drive that way by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.

However, the PPP’s main speech of the day came from the party’s information secretary Sherry Rehman who called for transparency and parliamentary audit the defence budget.

The main speaker from the government side was Social Welfare and Special Education Minister Zobaida Jalal who said President Gen Pervez Musharraf had sought equal development of all areas in Pakistan as she defended the budget.

MQM REFERENCE UNDER PROCESS: The speaker told the house that two references filed by the MQM and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Sher Afgan Khan Niazi seeking to disqualify Imran Khan were still being processed after MQM’s member Abdul Wasim had asked about the fate of his party’s reference.