By Staff Reporter
LAHORE: A senior leader of opppsition Pakistan Tahreek- e- Insaf party said on Sunday that police had arrested former finance minister Hammad Azhar in the eastern city of Multan and transferred him to custody in Lahore, an action the party branded political retaliation.
Officials in both cities said they had no information confirming any such arrest had taken place.
The gap between the two accounts left basic facts of the case unsettled well into the day. Multan’s regional police officer, Usman Akram Gondal, said when asked that he was not aware of an arrest and had nothing to report. In Lahore, the senior superintendent overseeing the police investigation division, Muhammad Naveed, said he had no confirmation that Azhar had been detained or handed over to his unit.
Local media, citing unnamed police sources, reported that Azhar was taken into custody near Multan and driven to Lahore. Some gave a more layered account: that officers had briefly stopped him on the road toward Multan for a document check, let him continue, and then arrested him hours later at a friend’s home near Lahore’s RA Bazaar neighborhood after he doubled back to the city. The competing versions could not be reconciled.
What is clearer is the legal history behind the case. Azhar has been named, according to police officials, in numerous prosecutions stemming from the riots that swept Pakistan on May 9, 2023, after former prime minister Imran Khan was arrested from the grounds of the Islamabad High Court on corruption charges. Among the episodes cited in cases against him are attacks on the Government Officers’ Residence gate in Lahore and on the city’s Corps Commander’s House, known as Jinnah House — a military residence whose storming by protesters that day remains one of the unrest’s most notorious moments. He has been formally listed as a proclaimed offender in connection with the violence since it occurred.
In January, an anti-terrorism court in Lahore moved to formalise that status. Judge Manzer Ali Gill declared Azhar and six co-defendants — Zubair Khan Niazi, Akbar Khan, Masood Ahmed Subhani, Arsalan bin Basharat, Farooq Anjum, and Habib Ahmed — proclaimed offenders in a case tied to an assault near the residence gate at Club Chowk, and issued permanent arrest warrants after the men repeatedly failed to appear in court.
PTI, in a statement, called the arrest the worst example of “political vengeance and fascism,” and said the government was using state power recklessly to suppress its opponents and silence the party. The party demanded Azhar be brought before a court promptly if a genuine criminal case existed against him, that his legal rights be protected, and that what it described as a pattern of retaliatory arrests come to an end.
The reported arrest is the latest turn in a long-running standoff between Azhar and the state. He went into hiding shortly after the May 9 unrest and reappeared publicly in May 2024, having evaded a Counter-Terrorism Department raid on the party’s Islamabad secretariat. At the time, police said he was wanted in three separate cases in the capital — two filed with Ramna police and a third opened by the CTD in 2023.
He has also cycled repeatedly through the party’s Punjab chapter leadership. He stepped down as its president for a third time in April, following two earlier resignation attempts the party had rejected. Pakistani news reports of an earlier departure, in August 2024, described Azhar citing limited access to Khan, who remains imprisoned, and restrictions on his own movement.
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