Bhutto's widower has mental-illness history, records say

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Asif Ali Zardari, favored to win the presidency in elections here next week, filed medical records in a London courtroom that said he suffered from a range of mental illnesses, according to The Financial Times on Tuesday.

Zardari, the widower of the former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, suffered from dementia, major depression disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, the newspaper reported the medical records said.

His lawyers used the diagnosis to argue he was unable to appear in court to challenge Pakistani corruption charges alleging he had bought a British manor with ill-gotten gains.

Zardari had served more than eight years in prison in Pakistan on corruption charges that were dismissed this year under an amnesty agreement.

The British case was dropped in March, about the same time the corruption charges against him in Pakistan were dismissed, the newspaper reported.

In the court documents, a New York psychiatrist, Philip Saltiel, wrote Zardari was suffering from "emotional instability" brought on by his lengthy incarceration, and he suffered memory and concentration problems, the report said. "I do not foresee any improvement in these issues for at least a year," Saltiel wrote.

The Pakistani high commissioner in London, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, an appointee of Zardari, said Zardari was now healthy, and that his doctors had "declared him fit to run for political office and free of any symptoms," the report said. He is running for the office that was vacated by President Pervez Musharraf, who resigned under pressure this month.

Meanwhile, in the increasingly lawless northern city of Peshawar early Tuesday, three men with assault rifles and the long hair and beards of the Taliban attacked a vehicle carrying a top U.S. diplomat, the provincial police chief said.

The bulletproof Land Cruiser carrying the diplomat, Lynne Tracy, the principal officer at the U.S. consulate in Peshawar, was stopped by the three men, who got out of a sport-utility vehicle and fired, said the police official, Malik Naveed Khan, inspector-general of police in North-West Frontier Province.

Tracy, who was headed to work at the consulate from her home about a mile away, was unharmed, he said.