KOHAT: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf candidate Naseem Afridi was elected Kohat district nazim by a big margin against JUI-F’s Maulana Niaz Mohammad in the nazim election held here on Wednesday.

According to a notification issued by the regional election commission, 41 members of total 49 were present in the house of which 40 polled their votes.

PTI’s Naseem Afridi got 26 votes, while former nazim Maulana Niaz Mohammad received only 14 votes.

Additional assistant commissioner supervised the election as presiding officer. District election commissioner Shahabuddin was also present on the occasion.

Gets 26 votes against JUI-F candidate’s 14

Soon after the polls, JUI-F district president Maulana Abdul Hayee expelled four councillors and senior party leader Gohar Saifullah from the party for lobbying and voting against their party candidate.

In the open division polls, JUI-F councillors Mohammad Iqbal, Mohammad Ishfaque, Momin Shah and Shahid Iqbal stood in the block of PTI’s Naseem Afridi under the old Feb 2017 severed agreement between the two parties.

Later, the ousted members told a press conference that the district cabinet could not cancel their basic membership, as it was the prerogative of the provincial council. They recalled that they had taken oath in February last along with the PTI MPs, district cabinets of both the parties and councillors besides the former district nazim to bring Naseem Afridi as new district nazim.

The then district nazim, Maulana Niaz, had tendered resignation to the chief minister in the presence of all the parties in Peshawar. But, in the following days he denied to have resigned and district secretary general Jameel Paracha was suspended by party chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman for forcing him to quit as nazim.

Councillor Mohammad Iqbal pleaded that they were still part of the forward block which was formed with the consent of the JUI-F and PTI councillors and district cabinets therefore they voted for Naseem Afridi.

“We were left with no choice except to side with Naseem Afridi by sticking to the agreement of February last for supporting him,” he said.

Meanwhile, sources privy to the whole political game confided to this scribe that the owners of the Model Town had a huge stake in the formation of forward blocks by the MPA and MNA of PTI, Jameel Paracha, PML-N’s former senator Abbas Afridi and MPA Amjid Afridi.

LAID TO REST: The five overseas Pakistanis who died near Madina in a road accident on Tuesday were laid to rest in their ancestral graveyards here on Wednesday.

Their bodies arrived in Pakistan through a commercial flight. They had lost their lives when their car hit a mountain due to failure of breaks while on way to Makkah to perform Umra.

The victims Qadir Mehmood, Afsar Khan, Zahid and Omer Farooq of Somari Payan were from the same family whereas Farooq Shah belonged to Sorgul village.

Published in Dawn, June 22nd, 2017