ISLAMABAD: Former prime minister Imran Khan urged Pakistan’s chief justice on Thursday to investigate a shooting incident that took place in Wazirabad city while he was leading an anti-government protest march to the federal capital last week in which he sustained bullet injuries and one of his supporters was killed.
Khan, who is also the chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, made the request while addressing the participants of the march after its resumption through video link, vowing that the anti-government caravan would not stop now and reach Islamabad later this month.
The PTI chief held dozens of public rallies in different parts of Pakistan while demanding snap elections since his ouster from power in a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April.
“The whole nation is looking toward you [the chief justice] now,” he said while addressing the protesters in the march from his residence in Lahore. “They planned [my assassination] and it all went as per the script. However, Allah saved me.”
Khan said the nation had lost its confidence in national institutions, adding it was the responsibility of the chief justice to restore it.
“We are going to become a banana republic,” he said. “You must save the country now.”
The ex-premier reiterated his allegations against Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah and ISI official Maj. Gen. Faisal Naseer, saying they were behind the assassination plot, though they have already rejected his accusations.
Referring to a forensic report of the container on which the bullets were fired in Wazirabad on November 3, Khan said it was confirmed there were two shooters who sprayed his convoy with bullets.
“This plan to kill me was hatched in September and I have already explained it in the public rallies,” he said, adding the people behind the bid on his life wanted to blame the murder on a “religious fanatic,” but their plan failed.
The PTI chief said an alleged shooter arrested from the spot was a “decoy,” and the coverup with the immediate release of his confessional statements had also been exposed.
He lamented that he could not get a first information report (FIR) registered against the three suspects “despite being a former prime minister and chief of the country’s biggest political party.”
“We are in government in the province of Punjab, but the police were being controlled from elsewhere,” he continued. “This country can’t progress as long as the law of jungle persists.”
Khan also urged the chief justice to investigate the brutal killing of journalist Arshad Sharif and the custodial torture and release of an obscene video of his close aide, Senator Azam Swati, to ensure rule of law in the country.
“Until justice is established, we can’t be a free nation,” he said.
Protests in Rawalpindi
Earlier, PTI workers ended their protest in Rawalpindi where they had blocked the Murree Road, a major thoroughfare surrounded by congested localities, for over three days to express solidarity with Khan after the attack on his rally.
“We don’t want to cause any inconvenience to the public,” Malik Aamir, a PTI focal person in Rawalpindi, told Arab News. “Our protest started after our leader’s convoy was attacked in Wazirabad and continued since the police were not registering our complaint.”
He said the party was now planning to set up more camps in Rawalpindi in the coming days to welcome the protest caravans that were expected to arrive from different parts of the country after the PTI resumed its march to Islamabad earlier in the day.
“Our march has started its journey again toward Islamabad, and the caravan is expected to reach Rawalpindi within ten days,” Sibghat Virk, the party’s central media head in Islamabad, told Arab News.
“The caravans from different parts of the country will arrive in Rawalpindi to merge into the main convoy and PTI chairman Imran Khan will then lead it to Islamabad,” he added.
The former prime minister said in a social media post on Wednesday he knew about the assassination plot against him in advance and had even exposed it in his speeches at his public rallies.
He also said he would divulge “the name of the second officer who was sitting with [Major] General Faisal [Naseer] in the control room from around 12 noon to 5 p.m. monitoring the execution of the plot.”
