ISLAMABAD - Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has termed the arrest of PTI chief Imran Khan by National Accountability Bureau (NAB) as under the law and on the basis of alleged massive corruption and corrupt practices in the Al-Qadir Trust case, involving a whopping amount of Rs 60 billion (£190 million).
The prime minister, in a televised address to the nation Wednesday night, referred to the violent spree unleashed by the PTI leadership and their supporters across the country inflicting severe damages, sternly warning the miscreants that they would be dealt with an iron hand.
“These terrorist and anti-state elements are being warned to desist from taking law into their hands, otherwise they will be dealt with an iron hands. Safeguarding the motherland and its ideology is more precious than their lives. We will not let their nefarious designs succeed,” he maintained. The prime minister said the rule of law meant facing all the cases legally. Inflicting damages to public and private properties amounted to terrorist acts.
“All are equal before the laws; these are the Islamic teachings and the beauty of democracy,” he said while advising the PTI chairman to face the NAB cases legally.
The prime minister said the Islamabad High Court had also termed Imran Niazi’s arrest legal and observed that NAB acted in accordance with the law.
He further said that the country’s past political history was very unpleasant based upon vendetta which had never yielded good results. The political parties learned from those experiences and reached to the ‘Charter of Democracy” by vowing to work under the Constitution.
Under the same passion, on April 11 last year, they took over the responsibilities of the government and did not adopt the vengeance-based approach as manifested by the PTI’s government led by Imran Niazi against their political opponents, he added. “Cases were decided on the basis of faces,” he said, adding the PTI’s former ministers even days ahead used to announce that a specific political leader would be arrested on a particular day, while Imran Niazi also kept on announcing that a wicket from the opposition side would fall soon. The prime minister elaborated that almost all the leaders, now sitting in the first two rows of the National Assembly, were sent to jails on false charges and there was no one to take notice during the previous regime of PTI. Rana Sanaullah was arrested on concocted charges of carrying 15 kilograms of heroin which was a black day in the history of Pakistan, he added. The prime minister said their sisters, daughters, sons and even relatives were not spared ‘in the pursuance of blind vengeance’, which also badly hampered the national development.
Due to the countrywide demands, concerns and serious apprehensions of the bureaucracy and the business community, they brought amendments to the NAB laws, he added. In the past, the prime minister said, when they were in the opposition and referred to the necessary amendments in the NAB laws, their genuine demands were spurned by the PTI’s leadership accusing them of seeking NROs. But the fact was that in the opposition, they adopted a national approach with responsibility. The prime minister explained that in the previous NAB laws, an accused was arrested on 90 days remand but after the amendment, that period was reduced to 15 days only which was in accordance with the fairness of the contemporary laws and under courts’ observations.