ISLAMABAD: A special court in Pakistan's Lahore on Saturday acquitted Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah in a heroin smuggling case filed against him in July 2019, after the complainant, the Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF), stated the charges against the minister were "wrong," local media reported. 

The ANF arrested Sanaullah while he was travelling from Faisalabad to Lahore on July 1, 2019, and said it had seized 15 kilograms of heroin from his vehicle. Sanaullah, then an opposition member, remained in custody for nearly six months, before being granted bail on December 24, 2019. 

The government of former prime minister Imran Khan, who was ousted in a parliamentary no-trust vote in April this year, had vociferously backed the charges against Sanaullah along with the former ANF director-general, Maj Gen Arif Malik. 

In Saturday's hearing before Judge Shaikh Naeem, two prosecution witnesses, ANF Assistant Director Imtiaz Ahmed and Inspector Ehsaan Azam, said they were present at the scene when Sanaullah was arrested and they did not see any drugs being recovered from his vehicle, Pakistan's Dawn newspaper reported. 

“We never saw any sort of drugs being recovered from the scene,” the paper quoted the officials as stating in their affidavits submitted in the court. 

The court then acquitted the interior minister and all others named in the case. 

In his petition for acquittal, Sanaullah accused the Khan regime of "victimizing" him on political grounds. 

In a September interview, Sanaullah had said Khan's accountability czar Shahzad Akbar had initially tried to pressurize the Islamabad police into placing a bag full of heroin into his lodge at the Parliament House, but the police had refused to follow his directives.

"When the Islamabad police refused to carry this burden then this matter was settled with the ANF," the minister had said. 

The interior minister said at the time he had complained to the then army chief, Qamar Javed Bajwa, in person as well as in writing and demanded action against the ANF officials, who he alleged had worked with the former government to frame him in the case. 

The ANF, like other paramilitary forces in Pakistan, is led by officers of the Pakistan Army on a rotational basis.