ISLAMABAD: The crackdown against former prime minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party continued on Wednesday, as police surrounded his Lahore residence on suspicion he was sheltering violent protesters who torched government buildings after his detention last week while state authorities arrested some of his top party leaders.
Khan was dragged out of a court in Islamabad by paramilitary Rangers on the instructions of the country’s anti-graft body on May 9, prompting groups of protesters in different parts of the country to attack public property and military installations that included the official residence of a top army general in Lahore.
The situation antagonized Pakistan’s powerful army that vowed to try people involved in the protests under the military law. It also intensified the government’s crackdown against Khan’s party that rounded up its workers and leaders.
The authorities arrested several high-profile PTI leaders, including the party’s Sindh president Ali Haider Zaidi, former human rights minister Shireen Mazari, and Maleeka Bokhari. Other leaders, such as Amir Mehmood Kiani and Sanjay Gangwani, announced they were quitting the PTI after expressing their difference with it in the wake of the violence.
“7500 of our workers have been arrested with most of them not produced before the courts as demanded by our law,” Khan said in a Twitter post in which he accused the government of making a mockery of Pakistan’s judiciary, constitution and rule of law. “As we speak houses are being broken in, smashed and men and women are being picked up.”
“And all this is being done to stop [the] PTI [from] forming the next government,” he continued.
Mazari, Khan’s close aide, was among the top PTI leaders rearrested by the authorities after the Islamabad High Court gave her a short bail earlier in the day.
The PTI called the development “absolutely shameful,” adding it was a “clear violation given by Islamabad High Court prohibiting her arrest until hearing [her case] tomorrow.”
Similarly, Zaidi, a top party official in Sindh province, was arrested from a local hospital in Karachi and sent to Jacobabad prison.
“My house arrest request was [previously] accommodated because of a health condition, Asthma & severe strain on my lower back,” he said in a Twitter post. “Now I am being arrested again from Ziauddin hospital & taken to Jacobabad jail.”
“Am I being punished for saying positive things about our armed forces or condemning the violence of May 9th,” he continued while referring to a statement he made before going to hospital.
PTI’s central information secretary Farrukh Habib also informed in a statement that one of his party’s women parliamentarians, Barrister Malika Bukhari, had been “arrested again by police and taken to an unknown location” after her detention in Adiala Jail for seven days.
Meanwhile, Punjab information minister Amir Mir said he had given PTI a 24-hour deadline to handover “30 to 40 terrorists” hiding at Khan’s residence and would not take an action before 2pm on Thursday.
