LAHORE: Retired Justice Riaz Kayani has refuted the vote-rigging allegations levelled by a former additional secretary of the Election Commission of Pakistan and termed them a pack of lies.

Addressing a press conference here on Monday, the ECP member from Punjab urged the Supreme Court to take suo motu notice of the accusations which also targeted against two former chi­ef justices of the apex court.

Retired Justice Kayani said Afzal Khan levelled the allegations because he had been denied service extension and promotion in violation of rules.

“He is levelling allegations 18 months after the elections, which smacks of a conspiracy,” he asserted.

“There must be some other force acting behind the scene because it is not logical that Afzal Khan waited for 18 months to reveal the rigging allegations.”

In an interview to a private TV channel on Sunday night, Afzal Khan who had retired a week after the 2013 general elections, had accused former chief justices Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and Tassaduq Hussain Jillani, Justice Riaz Kayani and former chief election commissioner Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim of having been involved in the rigging.

Justice Kayani said Afzal Khan’s TV interview “was a fixed and pre-planned mat­ch” as the interviewer was putting words into his mouth.

It may be mentioned that photographs of Afzal Khan participating in the PTI sit-in surfaced on the social media.

Justice Kayani also said there was no reason for him to resign on moral grounds, adding that it would give a message that his stance was weak.

Responding to a question, Justice Kayani said the magnetic ink used in the general elections could retain its effectiveness only for six hours and that this fact was revealed by authorities of the Pakistan Council of Scientific & Industrial Research, which had prepared the ink, only after the polls.

Published in Dawn, August 26th, 2014