By DPA
Riyadh : A Saudi official denied Wednesday that Saudi authorities were encouraging exiled former Pakistani premier Nawaz Sharif to return to his home country.
“The reports are entirely not correct,” an unnamed government official told the local Saudi Press Agency.
Following his ouster in a coup, Pakistan Muslim League leader Sharif sought political asylum in the Islamic state in 1999 and in 2001 promised not to return to Pakistan.
Saudi Arabia has received him strictly from a humanitarian stance, said the source, adding that Sharif had to respect his promise of not returning to the Pakistani political arena.
Recently, he broke his commitment to his Saudi hosts and pledged to go home after seven years in exile amid internal political turbulence ahead of a re-election campaign for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. He said he would fly back on Sep 10.
Sharif has branded Musharraf a dictator and has vowed to restore civilian democracy in the Islamic country of more than 160 million people.
In a message from London, he had said he did not “accept any patchwork of democracy and dictatorship. Whether Musharraf gets himself re-elected in uniform or out of uniform, it is unacceptable”.