Deposed Pakistan premier Nawaz Sharif, who has vowed to return home along with his brother on September 10 after a seven-year exile, would be detained after his arrival here and deported to either Britain or Saudi Arabia, a Pakistani minister has said.
After his detention, "Sharif might be kept in jail for a day or so and then he will be deported to London, Saudi Arabia or elsewhere," Railways Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmad was quoted by the Dawn as saying.
The government wanted to ensure that Sharif was not provided an opportunity to become a hero in a day, he said.
However, some reports here also said the government planned to divert to Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, the plane bringing Sharif and his brother Shahbaz to Islamabad.
The Sharifs have also turned down a plea by Saad Hariri, son of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, to delay their return to Pakistan and pledged to come back on Monday as scheduled, according to a close aide of the deposed premier.
Sharif and his brother told Saad Hariri, presumably an emissary of Saudi Arabia, during a meeting in London two days back that they would return home on Monday, the newspaper quoted Pervez Rashid, Sharif's aide, as saying.
Saudi Arabia, which negotiated the Sharifs' exile with Musharraf in 2000 and later provided them asylum in Jeddah, has already expressed unhappiness over their plans to return.
As an alternative, Hariri proposed that "Shahbaz could return home as planned on September 10 but Nawaz Sharif should follow him after the presidential elections," Pervez Rashid was quoted by the daily as saying. "But, Sharif has vowed to return to his home country, come what may."
The talks concluded with the Sharifs telling Hariri that on their part they would take this meeting as the last one on the matter, Pervez Rashid said. "It is a closed chapter now."
When asked why the Sharifs' PML-N party was keeping the name of the airline by which they would come back and its timing a secret, he said that under normal circumstances it would have made a public announcement well in advance.
"But these are not normal days for us, and we would like to give Musharraf as little time as possible to plot how best to thwart the Sharifs homeward journey."
There are only two flights to Islamabad from Heathrow on Monday by British Airways and PIA. The Sharifs could also take the Thai airline and go back home via Bangkok.
The worst that is expected to happen to the pair on landing is that they would be picked up at the airport and put under house arrest at their Rawalpindi residence "because the courts in their assertive mood would not allow Musharraf to harass them with concocted cases," the paper quoted an unnamed close aide of Sharif as saying.
The government has banned gathering of five or more people in Rawalpindi where the airport is located. Hundreds of Sharif's party workers have already been taken into preventive custody across the country.
Meanwhile, leaders of the All Party Democratic Movement led by PML-N have said they would go to airport on Monday to receive the Sharif brothers.
"If the government does anything, they would be playing against the sentiments of people of Pakistan and they (the government) will accelerate their own process of demise by doing this," PML-N Chairman, Raza Zafarul Haq, told the media after a meeting of APDM.
The PML-N has issued instructions to its workers across the country to reach the airport in disguise and not to stay in hotels and guest houses to avoid arrests.
More from rediff