SOME of Pakistan's Supreme Court judges and their children were secretly filmed in compromising positions with lovers and prostitutes as part of a dirty tricks campaign by the country's feared military intelligence.
Videos were sent out to at least three of the 11 judges in September as they were deciding whether General Pervez Musharraf was eligible to run for president while still army chief. One showed a judge with his young mistress while another was of a judge's daughter having sex with a boyfriend.
"The message was clear," said a British barrister who was told about the tapes by a Pakistani counterpart. "If you rule the wrong way, these will become public and your family destroyed."
The judges then gave an ambiguous ruling, allowing Musharraf to be elected but declaring that they would decide on his eligibility later.
It was a fear that this ruling, due last week, would go against him that led Musharraf to declare the state of emergency that has plunged the country into crisis.
Although Musharraf claimed he had acted to prevent extremists taking over the country, the judiciary appears to have been his principal target.
No jihadi leaders have been arrested but he sacked Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the chief justice, and eight of the 11 Supreme Court judges and scrapped the constitution.
Since declaring the state of emergency last weekend, Musharraf has placed most of the country's top judges and human rights activists under house arrest. Lawyers have so far led most of the protest rallies and hundreds have been arrested. The sacked judges have been replaced by others who swore an oath of allegiance to Musharraf.
According to western diplomats, it was Musharraf's intelligence chiefs who talked him into the desperate measure by convincing him that the Supreme Court was about to overturn his reelection as president. But it might have been false information.
Rana Bhagwandas, a Supreme Court justice who is under house arrest in the judges' colony in Islamabad, said his colleagues had not reached a verdict. Others claim the judges were poised to confirm Musharraf's election by a narrow margin, fearing the instability that would be created by a ruling against him. One retired general said he had been told that the judges were 6-5 in favour of upholding Musharraf's reelection.
The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) service has been reeling from Supreme Court rulings this year which have exposed illegal operations such as the kidnapping of Baloch nationalists and the detention and torture of terrorist suspects in secret jails.
According to government and Supreme Court sources, hidden cameras continued to be used to compile compromising evidence against judges until a few weeks before the emergency was declared.
The family of a woman who was having an affair with a Supreme Court judge said they were devastated to learn that her trysts had been filmed.
According to judicial sources, several judges had been receiving visits from prostitutes as "payment in kind" from private clients to whom they had given legal advice. "The ISI was sending the girls and the judges were enjoying it without knowing they were being filmed. Now they have videos of several judges," one court source said last week.
The chief justice himself was the subject of a separate ISI smear campaign during the government's attempt to have him dismissed in March. Among the affidavits claiming he had used his influence to help his son get a plum government job was an anonymous letter which implied a sexual impropriety.
The letter was denounced as "scandalous" by the judges shortly before Musharraf was forced to climb down and reinstate Chaudhry in July.
A military source who was privy to the dirty tricks campaign said it had failed. "They tried their best to blackmail the judges, but when the judiciary got public support, it was like getting new oxygen," he said.
A western diplomat said intelligence officials had visited judges as they deliberated on Musharraf's case.
"They met judges and put pressure on them. They claim they knew the decision was going to go against the president, but I've serious doubts about their intelligence work. They convinced him of something that wasn't true."