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Islamabad: An audio tape purportedly made by Al Qaida second-in-command Ayman Al Zawahiri has accused Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and other politicians of trying to destablise Pakistan at the behest of the United States.
Pakistan's lower house of Parliament convenes on Monday as the ruling coalition gears up to impeach Musharraf, while provincial legislatures are to begin tabling resolutions calling on him to step down.
The English-language tape was dropped off by an unidentified man at an office of Pakistan's ARY One television channel on Saturday, the station's news director said, but its authenticity could not be immediately verified.
An Arab journalist based in Islamabad who has met Zawahiri said it appeared to be the Al Qaida deputy leader's voice.
"I want to speak to you today regarding the miserable condition to which Pakistan has deteriorated," the voice believed to be Zawahiri's says in what would be his first English-language message.
"Let there be no doubt in your minds that dominant political forces at work in Pakistan today are competing to appease...the modern-day crusaders in the White House and are working to destablise this nuclear-capable nation under the aegis of America," Zawahiri said.
The whereabouts of Zawahri and Al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden have not been known since US-led forces launched a hunt for them in Afghanistan after the Al Qaida attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.
Both are believed to hiding somewhere along the Pakistan-Afghan border.
In the excerpts of the tape obtained by Reuters and aired by the television channel, Zawahiri did not say why Musharraf might want to destabilise the country. Zawahiri has in the past called for him to be overthrown.
In the message, Zawahri accused Musharraf of making disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan a "scapegoat" to appease the United States.
Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, has been under house arrest since confessing in a televised address in 2004 to smuggling nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
Zawahiri also criticised Musharraf for ordering an army assault on Islamabad's militant Red Mosque complex in July 2007.
Baker Atyani, the regional bureau chief of the Al Arabiya television channel, who met the Egyptian Zawahiri in June 2001, said the tape appeared to be genuine.
"I know his voice. I have heard his English. It's his accent. It's an Egyptian accent," he said.
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