By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf chief Imran Khan on Thursday asked his supporters blocking roads in various cities to lift blockades as the party resumed its stalled long march to Islamabad at the site in Wazirabad where a failed assassination attempt was made on the former prime minister last week.
“As our Long March for Haqeeqi Azadi has resumed once again, I am calling on all our workers to end their road blockades with immediate effect,” Khan said on his official Twitter handle.
Thousands of opposition supporters gathered in the city of Wazirabad ahead of the protest march where the former prime minister addressed them via a video link from his home in Lahore.
“I will reach Rawalpindi and I invite you all to come and march with us because it is a matter of the future of the country and the future of your children,” Khan said in his first address since he was wounded in the gun attack on November 3.
The ousted prime minister suffered multiple bullet injuries in his legs when a gun-wielding man opened fire on his protest convoy near Gujranwala. The man suspected of firing shots at the rally was detained and later a leaked video showing the purported shooter confessing to an attempt on the life of Khan surfaced.
However, Khan named three individuals — Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Interior minister Rana Sanaullah and an army official Major-General Faisal Nasser — for the assassination plot and demanded their resignations.
“This incident, this planned assassination attempt … I want to clear that this plan was made in September,” Khan told the rally. “On September 24, I said in a public rally that this plan was formed and that they will blame a religious fanatic (for it).”
Khan, recovering from injuries, said that the people who wanted him dead had planned to pin his murder on a ‘religious fanatic’.
“They planned that if a religious fanatic kills me, the responsibility from them will go away.”
Khan further said that the country is fast becoming a “banana republic” which has “no rule of law”.
He urged Supreme Court Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial to intervene as “the nation does not have trust in institutions anymore”.
“You have a big responsibility; the entire nation is looking at you. Even an ex-prime minister cannot register an FIR, which is his right,” he said.
Khan repeated his earlier allegations, saying Major General Naseer was “the mastermind” of the attack.
Earlier in the day, in an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan, Khan alleged there were two plots to ‘bump him off’.
“The first plot was when four people decided to bump me off. I found out because I was the head of the intelligence agencies for three and a half years,” Khan said, without providing more details.
Khan said a second plot was hatched in September. “Again I found out from within the intelligence agencies because people are appalled at what is going on.”
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