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| October 17, 2006 | Tuesday | Ramazan 23, 1427 |
Did Shoaib, Asif smoke cannabis in England?
KARACHI, Oct 16: While Pakistan cricket was rocked by another unwanted scandal on Monday, an eye-witness from last month’s eventful tour of England disclosed that both Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif smoked cannabis during the five-match One-day series there.
According to the eye-witness, both Shoaib and Asif used the ‘stuff’ after Pakistan had won the third One-day International at the Rose Bowl in Southampton on Sept 5, almost two weeks after the infamous Oval fiasco.
After the day/night fixture, Shoaib was seen allegedly smoking a cannabis-filled cigarette on the lawn of the team hotel along with Pakistan bowling coach, Waqar Younis.
Asif, meanwhile, practised something similar in the privacy of his room on the hotel’s first floor. The eye-witness saw Asif pull out some of the tobacco from his cigarette to stuff it with the banned substance.
He then lit up his cigarette in presence of Azhar Mota, an England-based recruiting agent who had come to strike a deal with Asif for a county contract.
Asif was then seen smoking away merrily as he asked Azhar Mota to fetch him a lucrative contract.
“Azhar bhai, I am interested in a contract worth 100,000 pounds because only then I would be in a position to give you 10,000 (as commission) if the deal is successful,” Asif was quoted as saying.
The eye-witness, who had come to see the matches from the United States and was at the hotel to meet the players that day, also claimed that he saw Azhar Mahmood, the former Pakistan all-rounder, sitting in Mohammad Yousuf’s room where Yousuf, Shoaib Malik, Shahid Afridi and Rana Naved-ul-Hasan were busy playing cards.
He saw Azhar passing on two small boxes, used for storing naswar, to the players.
According to the eye-witness, Afridi took one box which had naswar inside it while the other box containing the cannabis — a dried preparation or resinous extract made from a plant used generally illegally as a psychotropic drug — was passed on to Asif.
The Southampton incident surprisingly went unreported, unlike the infamous Grenada episode on the 1992-93 tour of the West Indies when Wasim Akram, Waqar, Mushtaq Ahmed and Aaqib Javed were detained before being released on bail since they had marijuana in their possession.
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