Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, elected Pakistan's 19th Prime Minister on Tuesday to fill a  two-month gap until Shaukat Aziz can take up his nomination, is the scion of a political-industrial family who has been close to President Pervez Musharraf.

The veteran politician, who turns 59 next month, is no stranger to serving military dictators: he was a minister from 1986 to 1988 during general Zia ul-Haq's regime.

Shujaat also served in the cabinet of Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister deposed by Musharraf in a 1999 coup.

But he was one of the first to turn his back on Sharief after he was exiled in 2000 and join an army-backed breakaway faction of the Pakistan Muslim League.

He went on to lead the new faction, Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q), and became kingmaker after the October 2002 elections, the first polls since Musharraf's coup.

"Shujaat's family have always remained with the military and played their game with its support," said vice president of Shujaat's Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) party Kabir Ali Wasti.

His father was a long-time parliamentarian who was assassinated in 1981. His cousin, Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, is chief minister of Punjab province, Pakistan's largest.

After the 2002 polls, Shujaat ensured PML-Q figure Zafarullah Jamali, a portly feudal lord from Pakistan's
poorest province Baluchistan, won the post of prime minister.

But Jamali's lacklustre 18-month performance, in particular his perceived failure to counter Musharraf's
defiant Islamist opponents, apparently wore out the president's patience. After months of rumours of imminent dismissal, he resigned on Saturday.

"Jamali was incompetent and has been saying himself that he had no powers and he called General Musharraf his boss," Wasti said.

Shujaat will pave the way for Musharraf's favoured man, Aziz, who must first get elected as a lower-house
federal MP before he can become prime minister.

Shujaat was born in 1945 in the industrial town of Gujrat in Punjab, some 110 km southwest of Islamabad. He was educated in Punjab's capital, Lahore, before studying industrial management at London's Watford College of Technology.

Shujaat's political career began in 1977 when he was elected to the Punjab provincial legislature, representing an alliance opposed to then premier Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, whose daughter Benazir later succeeded him.

Shujaat entered the Parliament in 1985 and soon rose to Cabinet ranks, serving as information minister
from 1986 until the death of military ruler Zia ul Haq in a plane crash in 1988.

Later he became interior minister under Sharief's second government from 1997 until the coup two years later.