PESHAWAR: Three women MPAs of the PTI on Friday denied the horse-trading charge and warned that they would sue the party leadership after two weeks if it didn’t withdraw their names from the list of lawmakers, who, it claimed, had sold their votes in the recent Senate elections.

They also said they were ready to face probe on the matter at any forum.

The warning was issued by Nageena Khan, Naseem Hayat and Nargis Ali during a news conference at the Peshawar Press Club.

Holding a copy of the Holy Quran, the three MPAs declared on oath that they were innocent and were falsely named as vote-selling lawmakers.

They said it was highly unfair that the leadership publicly called them dishonest though they’re not heard by the committee probing the Senate polls horse-trading issue.

Ms Naseem Hayat, who belongs to Swabi district, said she was one of the founding members of the PTI and had been associated with it for more than 22 years.

She said she was shocked to see PTI chief Imran Khan declare her a violator of party discipline over the recent Senate polls.

The MPA said the party chief didn’t think for a minute about her loyalty to the party.

“Had Imran Khan summoned me, I would’ve explained the actual position,” she said, adding that the vote-selling probe report was totally false.

Ms Naseem accused Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Pervez Khattak of deliberately including her name in the horse-trading list.

She said the CM would be held accountable for massive corruption in mega development projects.

‘Our hands are clean. We have always remained loyal to the party but ironically, the leadership called us corrupt,” she said.

The MPA said she would expose all those, whose names were excluded from the horse-trading list at the behest of the CM.

Ms Nageena Khan of Malakand division alleged that the list of ‘vote-selling’ MPAs was deliberately changed to protect ‘some culprit’.

She said she and two other women MPAs had voted for the PTI candidates in the Senate elections and accordingly, they all were elected Senators but the way the PTI leadership had maligned them was completely unfair.

The three lawmakers warned that if the party didn’t withdraw their names from the horse-trading list in the next two weeks, they would take the leadership to the court.

Published in Dawn, April 21st, 2018