LAHORE, June 30: Police conducted more abortive raids on Monday to arrest three women family members of the deposed Sharifs, who were wanted by the government for deportation.
The standoff between the government and the Sharif family began on Friday evening when the police cordoned off their house in Model Town. The police have been demanding the custody of the three women — Nusrat Shahbaz, the wife of former Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and her two daughters — and the family had been defying it.
A heavy police contingent with policewomen on Monday raided the house of Mr Farrukh Shah, the Sharif family spokesman, on Mohni Road near the shrine of Data Ganj Bukhsh.
The police searched and ransacked the house and asked for Mr Shah, who was not there that time. The police also collected some documents and compact discs from his house. A police contingent was deployed in and around the house, making movement of the inmates restricted.
Earlier Monday morning, the police raided the Model Town houses of the Sharifs and took Hamza Shahbaz, the elder son of Shahbaz Sharif and his uncle Mian Ilyas Meraj.
“The police used massive force in the post midnight raid. They searched every nook and corner of our house and harassed our ladies,” Salman Shahbaz, the younger son of Shahbaz Sharif, told Dawn.
He said some senior police officers escorted his elder brother and the uncle to lawns on the pretext of discussing the matter and then drove them away to an unknown place. Both were released in late evening.
“The midnight raids are intimidation and the violation of human rights,” Salman said and added the government was dealing them as if they were not Pakistanis.
COURT ORDER: The Lahore High Court on Monday ordered the recovery of PML-N president Shahbaz Sharif’s wife and four children through a court bailiff from the alleged house- confinement of police and their subsequent production in the court within 24 hours.
At night, Sharif family counsel Ashtar Ausaf Ali claimed that the siege allegedly imposed at 178-H Model Town had been lifted in the afternoon after the pronouncement of the Lahore High Court’s orders for the recovery of five members of PML-N president through a court bailiff.
He quoted the secretary to Justice Ali Nawaz Chauhan as saying that police had lifted the siege right after the recovery order was announced. “Since there is no siege, the house- confinement is over automatically and there is no need for the bailiff to raid and to further recover the detainees” Mr Ashtar told Dawn.
DEPORTATION CHALLENGED: The Sharif family counsel filed another petition in the LHC pleading that the federal government be restrained from deporting the five family members of the former provincial chief minister as there existed no agreement of any kind for the family’s stay outside Pakistan.
SHARIF’S REACTION: Meanwhile, deposed prime minister Nawaz Sharif has taken serious notice of the way the government is dealing with his family members.
Party sources said here on Monday that Mr Sharif would now like the three women to be “forcibly expelled” from Pakistan so that the world could see the ‘respect’ given to a family which had earlier been banished to Saudi Arabia.
The sources said the women being hunted by the police would not leave the country voluntarily.
It is said that at an earlier meeting Hamza Shahbaz had given an undertaking to the relevant authorities that passports of the three women would be submitted on Saturday evening for the completion of procedural formalities. There was an understanding that the women would leave the country by Thursday. However, the situation changed when the police gatecrashed and trampled privacy while looking for the wife and daughters of the PML-N president.
Mian Nawaz Sharif has asked his party leaders to remain in contact with other parties to expose the government’s highhandedness.