A key aide of former President Pervez Musharraf has said the army was in the dark about the country's cooperation with the US in the war on terror and top military commanders had opposed the handing over of Pakistani terror suspects to America.

Lt Gen (retd) Shahid Aziz, who served as Chief of General Staff from October 2001 to December 2003, said the army’s powerful General Headquarters did not know “most of the controversial things Musharraf did, including the handing over of Pakistani nationals to the Americans”.

Aziz told The News daily that the Pakistan army “as an institution was in the complete dark about what was going on between Washington and Islamabad in the war on terror”.

The General Headquarters and top army commanders had “strongly opposed the handing over of Pakistanis to the US but Musharraf did so on his own”, he said.

Aziz said the Pakistan army used to apprehend targeted foreigners and locals and hand them over to the Inter-Services Intelligence agency for interrogation but “they were handed over to the Americans without the knowledge of the army”.

The army, he said, had “made it clear that no Pakistani would be delivered to US authorities while the problematic Arabs would be deported to their respective countries”.

Aziz said: "We did not know for a long time that the Pakistani nationals were being handed over to the Americans by the ISI.”

This caused a lot of resentment in the top echelons of the army, he said.