ISLAMABAD: City police chief Tahir Alam Khan, and his senior officers, visited the PTI activists sitting at the Parade Avenue on Monday morning and urged them to vacate the place as their rally was over.

Their reply was that they had been staging a sit-in there since August 17. But when asked by police for the ‘No Objection Certificate’, needed for the purpose, they could produce none.

Police also told the PTI protesters to remove the shipping container that their leader Imran Khan has been using since the sit-in started to deliver his daily address to the crowd of PTI supporters who gather there every evening.

Police sources told Dawn that being a legal requirement the NOC would help the force to clear the place which has become an eyesore and an embarrassment for the PML-N and its government.

“Our prosecution department says the NOC will help police to get the Parade Avenue vacated by the PTI activists,” said a police officer.

PTI’s Chief Coordinator and organiser of the rally, retired Col Yunus Ali Raza, had given an undertaking to the government on November 28, which won it the NOC for the rally.

PTI spokesperson Shireen Mazari, replied to Dawn’s query in this regard with the SMS: “As far we know the police have not asked us to end our peaceful dharna. Also it is our right to protest peacefully and the area has long been cut off to traffic. So we are not disrupting anything.”

Superintendent of Police City Zone Rizwan Gondal’s SMS on the other hand just said: “nope”. And PTI MNA Asad Omar had “no information” about the matter.

Clause 2 of the NOC issued for the PTI rally said that “at the end of the jalsa (public meeting) at 23:59hrs the stage will be dismantled” but it is still there.

A source said police was considering legal action against the organisers of the PTI rally under the clause 42 of the NOC. It says that in case of violation of any of the terms and conditions, “the organisers shall be liable to face legal proceedings and the NOC shall automatically stand cancelled.”

Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2014