Former PM Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali laid to rest

Pakistan's former prime minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali was laid to rest in his ancestral are Rojhan Jamali, Jaffarabad, reported 24NewsHD TV Channel Thursday.

The 76-year-old died in Rawalpindi on Wednesday after recently suffering a heart attack.

The body of the former prime minister was shifted to Jaffarabad on a special plane where his funeral prayers were offered on Thursday’s evening. Before the funeral prayers, a contingent of police paid a salute. A large number of people including current and former provincial ministers, politicians and bureaucrats attended the funeral prayers.

Jamali was elected prime minister in November 2002, when president Pervez Musharraf allowed parliamentary elections to take place after he took power in a bloodless 1999 coup.

Jamali stepped down in the summer of 2004 after developing differences with the party leadership and Musharraf, paving the way for one of his cabinet ministers, Shaukat Aziz, to fill the post until the next parliamentary election in 2008.

Hailing from an influential political family, Jamali was the first and only prime minister to come from the oil-and-gas-rich province of Balochistan.

Jamali was born on Jan 1, 1944 to a Baloch political family of Mir Jaffar Khan Jamali, a close friend of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah in Roojhan Jamali village of Nasirabad division of Balochistan.

 His father Mir Shahnawaz Khan Jamali was a landlord. Originally a supporter of the Pakistan Peoples Party, Jamali emerged from the politics of Balochistan Province under military governor Rahimuddin Khan during the 1970s.

He became a national figure as part of the government of Nawaz Sharif and was Chief Minister of Balochistan for two non-consecutive terms (from June–December 1988 and November 1996 –February 1997).

Although he was a senior leader in the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) and Sharif's confidant, relations between Jamali and Sharif cooled and Jamali joined the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) after the 1999 coup led by General Pervez Musharraf. In the 2002 general election, Jamali won his bid for the office of Prime Minister after his supporters and colleagues crossed party lines to support him.

On 21 November 2002, Jamali was appointed the 15th Prime Minister of Pakistan-designate. He took the oath on 23 November 2002, until he unexpectedly announced his resignation in 2004. He was the fifth shortest-serving democratically elected Prime Minister in the history of Pakistan.