Former Pakistani president Ghulam Ishaq Khan dies

Former Pakistani President Ghulam Ishaq Khan passed away after long illness on Friday, his son-in-law said.

Ghulam Ishaq Khan, 91, the seventh president of Pakistan, had been suffering from pneumonia for three months, Irfanullah Khan Marwat said.

Khan was the Pakistani president from Aug. 17, 1988 to July 18, 1993.

Khan was born on Jan. 20, 1915 in the Bannu district of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province to a family of the Pashtun origin.

He completed his education in chemistry, and joined the Indian civil service prior to Pakistani independence.

Upon independence, he was involved in irrigation projects in West Pakistan, and later went on to join the finance ministry, eventually becoming the finance minister.

In the 1985 elections, he won a seat at the Pakistani Senate, shortly after which he was elected as the Senate chairman. Immediately after the death of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in 1988, Khan became the acting president in accordance with the country's constitutional rules of succession, and was formally elected to the position in December that year.

Khan's presidency was also marked by his use of Eighth Amendment reserve powers to check the government.

While the prime minister is Pakistan's head of government, Khan was able to dismiss the governments of both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif on charges of corruption, mismanagement, and nepotism, thereby triggering new elections, which the incumbent parties lost.

The second dismissal of government exacerbated institutional and political opposition to Khan, leading to his resignation in 1993, and later to a constitutional amendment that reduced the presidency to a figurehead.

Source: Xinhua