LAHORE, Feb 1: The chief minister has blamed a medicine manufactured and supplied by a Sindh pharmaceutical company for scores of heart patients’ deaths in Punjab in the recent weeks.

At a press conference here on Wednesday, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif said his government would thoroughly investigate whether the supply of the tablets was by a mistake or a “conspiracy against the people of Punjab”.

He said the factory producing the drug had been sealed in Karachi and its owners put on the exit control list by the Sindh government.

Mr Sharif cited reports from a British laboratory, saying the killer drug, Iso Tab, produced by the Efroze Chemicals contained 50mgs of an anti-malaria agent.

He said doctors would prescribe only 25mgs per week of the agent to malaria patients while heart patients were prohibited from using it.

To the relief of poor heart patients affected by the tablet, he said, local health experts with their European counterparts had found the drug’s antidote which was now being administered to the affected people.

The chief minister said the Punjab inspector general had gone to Karachi on a special plane to initiate an action against company officials. He said the Sindh chief secretary had confirmed that the chemicals factory had been sealed and its owners restricted from traveling abroad.

He said those found responsible for deaths in the judicial commission and DIG Zulfiqar Cheema led inquiry would be punished.

When asked why federal and provincial drug testing laboratories approved the tablet, he said it was a thorny question that would be investigated properly.

To a query, he said all products of the Efroze Chemicals would be withdrawn from the province while the Iso Tab had already been confiscated from pharmacies and hospitals.

He said the supplies of the faulty drug to Punjab were a conspiracy, adding that a senior federal authority had earlier conspired against the province, especially the Lahorites, during the dengue outbreak last year.

An important federal government personality, he said, tried to send back the experts of a friendly country through a “heinous conspiracy”. He neither named the “important person” nor explained the “heinous conspiracy”.

To a question about appointing a full-time health minister in Punjab, the chief minister got emotional and recounted his services as health minister for improving the health sector in the province. Mr Sharif has been holding the portfolio since he took over as chief minister in 2008.

The opposition in Punjab Assembly seeks his resignation holding responsible for the deaths of heart and dengue patients in the recent outbreaks.

He urged the opposition in Punjab not to do politics on bodies, saying “we all should admit our past mistakes and now work together for devising a long-term policy to kill chances of recurrence of such a tragedy”.