ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah said on Saturday his government had nothing to do with the cases registered against Azam Swati, a close aide of former prime minister Imran Khan who is under custody for his remarks critical of top military officials.
Swati was taken into custody by the Sindh police on Friday, hours after the Balochistan High Court freed him in a case registered against the senator for using “derogatory language” and “provoking the people against the army.”
On Saturday, police in Sindh’s Qambar Shahdadkot district confirmed that the opposition senator was in their custody in connection with two cases registered against him.
While party leaders decried Swati's handover to the Sindh police despite his release by the Balochistan court in a similar case, the Pakistani interior minister sought to distance the government from it and said the senator was not being "politically victimized."
"To say that Azam Swati is being politically victimized, how is it political victimization," Sanaullah asked reporters in Lahore.
"Has he said anything against us that we have had a case lodged against him?"
The minister, however, said that Swati had "maligned" the judiciary and the army, and the senator was booked only on the basis of complaints filed against him by some individuals.
"If the court acquits Mian Shehbaz Sharif and Hamza Shehbaz in a fake case, then they congratulate the chief of army staff... meaning thereby that on the one hand you are telling the army that 'you are forcing the court to announce verdicts' and mocking the judiciary on the other hand," he said.
Sanaullah's remark was a reference to Swati's tweet in which he had congratulated the former army chief after a court acquitted Prime Minister Sharif and his son in a money laundering case against them in October.
"If we were to have cases registered against them or to adopt an approach similar to what they had against us, then today Shehryar Afridi, Fawad Chaudhry or Shehbaz Gill would not have been facing a case in which they could get bail in four days," Sanaullah added.
Swati was arrested by the Federal Investigation Agency in Islamabad on November 27 for the second time in less than two months for his remarks at a rally and strongly worded tweets about military officials, including former army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa.
The senator was booked under Section 20 of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016, which deals with offences against the dignity of a person, according to Pakistan's Dawn newspaper. Separately, he was nominated in multiple complaints filed with police in Balochistan and Sindh provinces.
The opposition senator, following his release on bail after being arrested for the first time, had said that he was stripped naked and tortured in custody. The senator had accused two Pakistani intelligence officials of being behind the custodial torture.
Swati had also said at a November news conference that his wife had received an obscene video which featured him and her, but had refused to divulge further details.
