**Pakistan’s Supreme Court has threatened to jail the head of the country’s anti-corruption agency unless he reopens hundreds of corruption cases.**The court said the chairman of the National Accountability Bureau, Naveed Ahsan, would be in contempt of court if he did not act within 24 hours.
An amnesty in 2007 invalidated charges against a number of top politicians.
But the court threw the order out in December, and has been demanding the revival of corruption cases ever since.
Several of the pending cases involve President Asif Zardari.
Before taking office, he spent years in jail after being convicted on corruption charges he says were politically motivated.
Power-sharing
The amnesty, which protected officials and politicians from charges dating back to the 1990s, was introduced by former military leader Gen Pervez Musharraf.
It was seen as the basis for a power-sharing deal between Mr Musharraf and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in December 2007.
Meanwhile, the director general of Pakistan’s top police investigation agency, Ahmed Riaz Sheikh, has reportedly been detained on orders of the Supreme Court.
His lawyer, Rashid Rizvi, told Reuters news agency he had been sent into police custody after he “withdrew his challenge to his conviction”.This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.