PTI supporters have been protesting against the arrest of former prime minister Imran Khan. Imran Khan was arrested in a corruption case yesterday by Rangers.

According to journalist Iftikhar Firdous of The Khorasan Diaries, the protesters torched Edhi ambulance and police van. The protesters also opened fire towards the Balahisar Fort, which is the headquarters of the Frontier Corps —North, and they vandalised nearby shops and broke into Radio Pakistan building. 

He said: “4 bodies and 27 injured have been received at the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar.”

He added the police have arrested 30 people so far.

4 bodies and 27 injured have been received at the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar. Some of them have been identified and other have not. The situation on the road is now becoming more violent. More than 30 arrests have also been made. #Peshawar

— Iftikhar Firdous (@IftikharFirdous) May 10, 2023

Earlier, police had also opened fire at protesters in Quetta, killing one person.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab government have requested deployment of army to control the situation.

News Desk

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After the attack on the 2014 Army Public School in Peshawar in which the TTP claimed responsibility for killing around 149 people including 132 schoolchildren, he shamelessly sat down with the then PML-N government – though he lacked a shred of regret – and the regime at that time came up with the National Action Plan to deal with terrorism and extremism, but it was never implemented.

Earlier this month, thousands of locals staged a protest sit-in in South Waziristan’s Wana area against the rising terrorism in the tribal areas. Similar anti-Taliban demonstrations have been held in various other parts of KP.

MNA from North Waziristan Mohsin Dawar, the National Democratic Movement (NDM) chief, said in a tweet that the Pashtuns of South Waziristan had come out in large numbers in Wana to protest against terrorism “and Talibanisation in our areas”.

“Our people refuse to be used as cannon fodder and scapegoats in the new great game being imposed on the region,” he added.

Imran Khan, as the chief of the party that rules the province, did not even bother to speak to the protestors. Perhaps he did not wish to anger the TTP, which he has been backing for so many years.

Imran is also responsible for our economic woes. He should have gone to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as soon as he came to power. But being an arrogant egomaniac, he instead relied on overseas Pakistanis and ‘friendly countries’ to make things work.

The Pakistani diaspora sent him a few thousand bucks, and the aid we received from friendly countries was not enough. He eventually did go to the IMF, and after seeing that Pakistan had exhausted all its resources, he inked a loan pact with the country with very harsh conditions. So strict that the PTI government could not implement them.

Imran’s party had around four years to rule compared with the current rulers who have not even completed one full year in power. But Imran Khan still has the gall to blame them for ‘his’ fiscal mess.

Imran is also indirectly responsible for the ongoing flour crisis, as it was his government in Punjab that miscalculated the quantity of wheat that needed to be imported.

Besides, there has been an uptick in extremism and militancy in Punjab ever since the PTI teamed up with the Pakistan Muslim League – Q (PML-Q) to come into power in the province. The recent Taliban attacks in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab, the desecration of Ahmadi ‘worship places’ as well as the changes in the words of the nikkahnama to single out the already persecuted community and the incident wherein a fanatic in Narowal confessed to killing a (Muslim) man after accusing him of committing “Shirk” (the sin of idolatry or polytheism) are just a few examples of this growing extremism.

Imran has recently forced the Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa chief ministers to dissolve the provincial assemblies saying that snap polls are an elixir to the financial woes. But if you ask him how, he will be as clueless as he was back in 2008. No plan at all, yet his blind supporters can’t see that. Perhaps, the blame lies with our textbooks that are filled with lies.

Imran is willing to sacrifice Pakistan for the sake of his insatiable ego. He also wanted to return to the National Assembly after making his members resign in the wake of his ouster from power in April last year. However, the NA speaker has accepted the resignations of only 35 PTI MNAs – just about enough to ensure that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif wins the trust vote that Imran was hoping he would take.

To clarify, I am neither a “jiyala, nor a ‘patwari” but a neutral journalist, who writes things as he sees them.

Bilal Farooqi

The writer is a Karachi-based journalist.

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