ISLAMABAD - Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan said Wednesday that it is a ‘good thing’ that the government allegedly leaked an audio about the US cipher, saying he thinks the whole cipher itself should be leaked to the public.
Imran Khan accused Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of leaking the latest audio. “They did a good thing by leaking it, I wish they leak the whole Cipher too so everyone knows how big of a foreign conspiracy it was,” Imran Khan said while responding to reporters. “I haven’t even played [on it] yet. Now [we will] play when they expose it.”
In a major development on Wednesday, a sound bite of former prime minister Imran Khan speaking about the US cipher— what he time and again has alleged was a threat letter to Pakistan — surfaced after multiple audio leaks of top government officials.
The PTI was quick to defend the leaked conversation and senior party leader, Fawad Chaudhry was the first to react. “The new leaks only confirm the attempt to hide the US cable from the [then] prime minister [Imran Khan],” Fawad wrote on Twitter, minutes after the audio surfaced.
Earlier in the day, a clip was making rounds on social media featuring a conversation between what is believed to be Imran and his former principal secretary, Azam Khan, about a cipher that the PTI chief has for long presented as evidence of a “foreign conspiracy” to oust him from the top office.
In the audio clip, Imran is heard saying: “We only have to play on this. We don’t have to name [any country]. We only have to play with this, that this date was [decided] before. “The new thing that will emerge is that the letter …”
The PTI Twitter account subsequently shared a video of reporters questioning Imran regarding the matter, to which he said: “The [US] cipher should leak so it comes out before everyone and everyone can know how big a foreign conspiracy happened”. Questioned on a part of the clip where Imran said he would “play with the cable”, the PTI chief said: “I have not even begun to play with it. Now they will expose it so we will play with it.” His comments come as party leaders characterised the latest leaks as evidence the cipher was real.
An accompanying hashtag — “cypher aik haqeeqat hai (the cypher is a reality)” — was the top trend on Pakistani Twitter, racking nearly 100,000 retweets at the time of this report.