ISLAMABAD / LAHORE: The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) has decided to challenge the nomination by the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz of former finance minister Ishaq Dar as a candidate for a Senate seat.

According to PTI spokesperson Fawad Chaudhry, his party’s chairman Imran Khan has given the task of challenging the nomination papers of the PML-N candidates, particularly Mr Dar, to senior party leader and candidate for a Senate seat from Punjab Chaudhry Mohammad Sarwar and Opposition Leader in the Punjab Assembly Mian Mehmood-ur-Rasheed.

The PTI believed that Mr Dar had been involved in money laundering and that it was shameful that someone who had been absconding from the courts would return to the country to take part in the Senate elections, said Mr Chaudhry.

“The PML-N leadership should be ashamed of itself for nominating plunderers like Ishaq Dar for Senate elections,” he added.

Imran alleges extrajudicial killings carried out on Shahbaz Sharif’s orders

Talking to media personnel soon after arriving in Lahore, the PTI chairman said a “money launderer like Ishaq Dar” should be behind bars. “It is strange that someone who should be in jail is being awarded a Senate ticket by the PML-N,” he remarked.

“What kind of a Senate the PML-N wants to create?” Mr Khan asked, alleging that the ruling party “is criminalising the systems in Pakistan”.

Mr Khan accused Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif of using police to get people killed and announced that his party would take what he described as “confessional statements of former police inspector Abid Boxer” to the courts.

The cricketer-turned-politician said the former inspector had confessed to killing people on the instructions of Mr Sharif. “Police never kill people, until and unless a chief minister orders or grants permission to kill people,” he quoted Mr Abid as having said.

He was of the opinion that after the statements made by Mr Abid, there was no doubt that people were killed in 2014 in Model Town, Lahore, on the orders of the chief minister.

The PTI chief alleged that “extrajudicial killings in Subzazar and recently in Kasur” were carried out on the orders of Mr Sharif.

“Abid Boxer fled to Dubai as Shahbaz Sharif wanted to kill him because he could expose the chief minister,” Mr Khan said. The Supreme Court had rightly likened the Sharif brothers to “a mafia”.

He claimed that not a single extrajudicial killing had taken place in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. “This is the difference between professional police of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the police forces of Punjab and Sindh,” Mr Khan said.

He said the nation stood by the Supreme Court and urged the court to take notice of the “foul language” being used against the judiciary by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and a few federal ministers.

Criticising a leading media group for what he called a “smear campaign launched by it against the KP government”, he said the provincial government had had a legal notice served on the group.

Meanwhile, the PTI nominated Ejaz Chaudhry as its candidate for a Senate seat from Punjab reserved for technocrats and Andaleeb Abbas as its candidate for seats set aside for women.

Published in Dawn, February 9th, 2018