ISLAMABAD, May 27: The People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League (N) leaders have condemned the detention of opposition MPAs on the orders of Speaker Punjab Assembly in Lahore.

Speaking at a hurriedly-called joint press conference here on Tuesday, PPP leaders Raza Rabbani, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Syed Khursheed Shah and Farhatullah Babar described the incident as “unprecedented” in the parliamentary history of the country.

They said it was a black day in the democratic history of the country. They said the opposition MPAs belonging to the major parties were picked up by the police from the premises of the assembly. A large number of police personnel conducted the operation as if they were arresting some terrorists of Al-Qaeda organiztion, they said.

The PPP leaders said protesting in the assemblies was the right of parliamentarians and what happened in the Punjab Assembly on Monday was not a new thing. They said the MPAs were protesting against the Legal Framework Order (LFO) as it was also a provincial matter.

The PPP leaders accused the PML-Q government of trying to sabotage the ongoing talks on the LFO. He further alleged that some of the members of the treasury benches had intentionally created a rumpus in the Punjab Assembly on Monday to malign the opposition members.

They were of the view that “like National Assembly speaker, the Punjab Assembly speaker had also become a party” and was no more impartial. They claimed the speaker had no powers to order police to detain any member of the house. Therefore, they said, the MPAs were detained illegally.

Meanwhile, PML-N’s acting chief Makhdoom Javed Hashmi also condemned the locking up of MPAs in a police station and called it a “most uncivilized act” in the parliamentary history. In a statement he said the “puppet rulers” were mistaken in believing that by intimidating the opposition with such tactics they could perpetuate dictatorship.