- Confirms judicial body will have authority to investigate those involved in taping and leaking calls
FAISALABAD: Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah has claimed that PTI Chairman Imran Khan sowed the seeds of hatred in the minds of the youth by telling them lies and defaming the armed forces.
“And he did all this to prevent his arrest. The day Imran was arrested, the youth he had misguided and trained attacked military installations.
“In no city did people come out for him. Only a handful of people protested and all of them were those whom he had misguided,” the minister said in a rally in Faisalabad.
وفاقی وزیر داخلہ رانا ثناءاللہ فیصل آباد میں خطاب کر رہے ہیںhttps://t.co/NYxDQLOidU
— PMLN (@pmln_org) May 21, 2023
“And now, Imran and his supporters have gone into hiding. He is so scared that he doesn’t even ask about his party leaders who are in jail.”
Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah slammed PTI Chairman Imran Khan for the “political victimisation” of the PML-N.
“He sent Nawaz sahib to jail in a fake case […] and I became a victim of these cases as well. He loves sending the opposition behind bars and made sure that we didn’t get medicines, home-made food or fans,” he said in an address in Faisalabad.
“But one day, just one day he had to go to jail and look what happened.”
Earlier, responding to PTI Chairman Imran Khan who had questioned powers of commission investigating audio leaks pertaining to judiciary, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah confirmed the judicial body will have authority to investigate those involved in taping and leaking the calls.
“The commission, headed by Justice Qazi Faez Isa, will possess the power to probe into who is taping the audios and who is leaking them,” the minister said, told a private Tv news channel.
The interior czar, during the show, spoke about Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif-led government’s decision to constitute a three-member commission to conduct an investigation into the audio leaks pertaining to the judiciary.
In an announcement made a day earlier, the government notified a high-powered judicial commission to be headed by senior puisne judge of Supreme Court Justice Qazi Faez Isa, while Balochistan High Court Chief Justice Naeem Akhtar Afghan and Islamabad High Court (IHC) CJ Aamer Farooq are named as members of the judicial body.
“The government was under pressure from the civil society and others to pursue inquiry on the matter of audio leaks,” the minister said, adding that the government requires material to take the matter into the Supreme Judicial Council.
“Crime cannot take the shield of privacy,” Sanaullah said, warning against using privacy for committing crimes as revealed in the alleged audio leaks.
Meanwhile, Khan spoke about the commission’s constitution insisting that its Terms of Reference “suffer from a deliberate omission” with no accountability of who is “behind the unlawful and unconstitutional surveillance.”
Taking to his Twitter, the cricketer-turned-politician shared a strongly-worded tweet in this regard.
“They fail to take into account the issue that who is behind unlawful and unconstitutional surveillance of PM office and sitting judges of the Supreme Court. The Commission should be empowered to investigate who are these powerful and unknown elements who tap and record telephone conversation of citizens including high public functionaries,” he tweeted.
Khan further termed the leaks as a “serious breach of privacy guaranteed under Article 14 of the Constitution.”
