ISLAMABAD: A sessions court in Islamabad granted the Federal Inves-tigation Agency (FIA) a day’s remand of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader Shah Mahmood Qureshi on Sunday in the cipher case. Judicial Magistrate Ehtisham Alam Khan issued the orders, asking the body to produce him before the court on Monday.
Qureshi, who served as foreign minister under ex-prime minister Imran Khan and is the vice chairman of the PTI, was arrested in the capital Islamabad on Saturday evening.
Khan — ousted via a parliamentary vote in April last year — had al-leged on March 27, 2022, that Washington orchestrated a plan to re-move him from office — and brandished the cipher at a public rally to back his claims. The US has time and again denied such allegations, terming them “categorically false”.
Qureshi time and again has reiterated that the US cipher was reality, backing the party chief’s claims that the US engineered his ouster from power by supporting the opposition’s no-confidence motion in April last year.
The cipher case against the former premier became serious after his principal secretary Azam Khan stated before a magistrate as well as the FIA that the former PM had used the US cipher for his “political gains” and to avert a vote of no-confidence against him.
In relation to the case, the FIA also arrested the PTI chief a day earlier and today, it also apprehended ex-PTI secretary general Asad Umar from Islamabad.
Khan, a former international cricket star turned politician, was jailed earlier this month after being convicted of graft in one of the more than 200 cases he has faced since being ousted as PM in a no-confidence vote in April 2022.
The three-year sentence disqualifies him from taking part in elections. –Agencies
