Bhutto challenges Pakistani voter list in court

ISLAMABAD, June 26 (Reuters) Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has filed a complaint over what she said was the exclusion of millions of people from electoral rolls, saying polls held with the lists would be unacceptable.

Pakistan is due to hold a general election around the end of the year, and President Pervez Musharraf is under growing domestic and international pressure to make sure they are fair after widespread allegations of rigging in the last vote in 2002.

Bhutto, who has lived in self-exile for nearly a decade, filed a petition with the Supreme Court in the city of Lahore, saying millions of eligible voters had not been registered on new electoral lists.

''It is an institutionalised fraud in the electoral process,'' her lawyer, Mohammad Latif Khan Khosa, told Reuters.

Bhutto said in her petition that the electoral process ''would not be acceptable to the people of Pakistan'' if polls were conducted using the electoral rolls.

''Such a fraud perpetrated would endanger the very federation and be detrimental to the interest of Pakistan,'' she said.

Controversy over electoral lists erupted this month after election officials said there would be an estimated 60 million eligible voters in the forthcoming election, about 12 million fewer than in 2002.

They said the state-run National Database and Registration Authority had erred in preparing electoral lists for the 2002 vote by registering many people who did not have national identity cards.

Bhutto said in her complaint the condition of national identity cards should be scrapped and election officials should register all Pakistanis aged 18 and over, in line with the constitution.

The political climate is heating up in Pakistan as the elections approach.

Musharraf, who is also army chief and is due to seek a second term as president, is facing a crisis over his move to sack the country's chief justice in March.

Senior US officials visited Pakistan this month offering broad support for the important US ally in the war on terrorism while exhorting Musharraf to ensure elections were free and fair.

REUTERS AK RN1813