The 1999 military takeover in Pakistan was a bloodless coup d'état initiated by the military staff at the Joint Staff HQ working under Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee General Pervez Musharraf. The instigators seized control of the civilian government of the publicly elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on 12 October 1999. On 14 October, General Musharraf, acting as the country's Chief Executive, issued a controversial provisional order that suspended the Constitution of Pakistan. Martial law was declared due to the breakdown of civil-military relations. Tensions between the Sharif administration and joint chiefs chairman General Musharraf reached a breaking point. In an attempt to maintain civilian control over the military, Lieutenant-General Ziauddin Butt, then Director of the ISI, was hastily approved for the appointment of the army chief, but the decision was opposed by senior members of the Joint Staff HQ, who refused to follow the new chain of command, deciding instead to direct the Military Police to detain General Butt and prevent his taking control of the military. The pace of the coup startled political observers; within 17 hours of Sharif's attempt to relieve General Musharraf, army commanders took control of all key government institutions throughout the country and placed Sharif and his administration, which included his brother, under house arrest. Military police took control of the state broadcaster, radio and the entire critical communications infrastructure, and announced that Sharif had been dismissed. The Supreme Court of Pakistan led by Chief Justice Saeeduzzaman Siddiqui validated the martial law under a "doctrine of necessity" but limited its legality to three years. Meanwhile, Sharif was tried by the Judge Advocate General Court and convicted of endangering the lives of all passengers aboard the aircraft carrying Musharraf, with the military court upholding the decision. When the decision was announced, it sparked fury in the conservative PML(N) but was welcomed by many of its political opponents. In 2000, the Supreme Court accepted arguments that the coup was a "violation of the constitution". However, acting Chief Justice Ershad Hasan later argued of the constitutionality of the coup. On 10 December 2000, Musharraf unexpectedly issued a pardon to Nawaz Sharif to be flown to Saudi Arabia. In 2016, Musharraf later confessed in an interview given to Kamran Shahid of Dunya that "he pardoned Sharif from life imprisonment on the request of King Abdullah and Rafic Hariri." In 2001, Musharraf issued the executive decree