LAHORE: The Balochistan Police on Thursday claimed to have arrested Muhammad Khan Bhatti, the secretary of Punjab Assembly and principal secretary to former Punjab chief minister Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi from Quetta.
The police said Bhatti was trying to ‘cross into Iran’ to escape the ongoing corruption case against him.
Bhatti, a close aide of the former Punjab chief minister, is accused of taking more than Rs460 million as bribe from officials of the Punjab Highway Department.
On the other hand, Punjab Anti-Corruption DG Sohail Zafar Chatta constituted a four-member team to bring Muhammad Bhatti from Quetta to the Anti-Corruption Establishment (ACE) headquarters in Lahore as he is wanted in a corruption case.
The Punjab ACE officials confirmed that Bhatti was arrested while attempting to escape the country via the Balochistan-Iran border.
The ACE has already arrested SDO Highway Police Rana Muhammad Iqbal on charges of bribery. According to the FIR, Iqbal gave millions of rupees to the accused to get posts of his choice. “Several officials from the communications and construction departments were working for Muhammad Khan Bhatti,” the FIR states.
Bhatti’s name has also come up in an audio clip of an alleged telephone conversation between the Elahi and a lawyer in which the former chief minister is purportedly talking about fixing Bhatti’s case before a sitting apex court judge.
Ch Pervaiz Elahi has denied any wrongdoing, claiming that a “wrong impression” was being given to his conversation with the lawyer about the Muhammad Khan Bhatti case.
Muhammad Khan Bhatti went ‘missing’ after he was apprehended last month from the Matiari district in Sindh while he was going to the Sindh High Court for protective bail.
Following the arrest, Bhatti’s wife Kausar Parveen filed a plea in the Lahore High Court, seeking her husband’s recovery and arguing that he was being subjected to political victimisation and humiliated for his loyalty to Elahi.
She implored in her petition that her husband had always discharged his duties in the most faithful manner and to the best of his abilities, but, on account of his family’s political background, he is being subjected of victimisation by the government headed by rival political parties.
She further claimed in her petition that he husband had told her that his political rivals have decided to implicate him in false criminal cases.
