Zawahiri asks Pakistanis to remove Musharraf

"I call on the people of Pakistan to work to remove this traitor from power...and I call on every officer and soldier in the Pakistani army to disobey their commanders' orders to kill Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan," he said in a video released on a Jihadi website.

In the third message from the organisation in a week Zawahiri said that "Musharraf was prepared to flee abroad where he had bank accounts when the popular revolution breaks out."

According to the video the "message to the people of Pakistan" was recorded after the third anniversary of the fall of the regime of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003.

It followed an audiotape broadcast on Al-Jazeera television last Sunday in which al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden called on Muslim fighters to go to Sudan to wage war against "crusader thieves" and slammed the international isolation of the Hamas-led Palestinian government.