ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan has withdrawn his demand for resignation of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and says now he wants to see the premier in prison.

“The prime minister’s final destination is Adiala jail. Now I am not demanding his resignation, but imprisonment,” Mr Khan said at a press conference on Thursday.

He warned the prime minister against “threatening” the Joint Investigation Team and the Supreme Court.

Mr Sharif said in his speech on the occasion of inauguration of the Lowari Tunnel on Thursday: “Do not test my patience.”

Warns Sharif against ‘threatening JIT, Supreme Court’

Mr Khan asked the prime minister whom he was threatening and said, “If anyone stands against the Supreme Court it will be a violation of the Constitution.”

The PTI chief said the prime minister had told lies in parliament and before the Supreme Court for which he could go to jail for at least seven years.

Mr Khan said the prime minister and his family had been involved in corruption for 30 years and at least one dozen cases of corruption of the Sharif family were lying with the National Accountability Bureau.

The government was making abortive attempts to cover up corruption of the prime minister, he said. Giving an old document to private TV channels on Wednesday night as a new document was an attempt to misguide people, he added.

“However, before being rejected by the Supreme Court on Thursday, the document was exposed on social media on Wednesday night,” he said.

In reply to a question about a tense political situation developing in the country due to confrontation between the ruling PML-N and opposition parties, he said: “There was no need of any war against Nawaz Sharif as his workers and supporters always leave him alone at crucial times.

‘‘We have seen his supporters offering no resistance when Mr Sharif was sent to Saudi Arabia and again when his aircraft landed at Islamabad airport and he was not allowed to disembark from the plane.”

Taking to reporters outside the Supreme Court after the hearing of the Panama Papers case, PTI spokesman Fawad Chaudhry said not only Mr Sharif but his entire family would be sent to jail for committing corruption, money laundering, forgery and perjury.

He said the documents presented by the Sharif family before the Supreme Court were “paper aeroplanes and boats”.

Published in Dawn, July 21st, 2017