Pakistan’s Imran Khan arrested, in move slammed by his party as an ‘abduction’

Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan was on Tuesday arrested in Islamabad after refusing to answer summons in a case issued by the country’s top anti-corruption agency.

Dozens of heavily armed paramilitary troops took Khan into custody at the Islamabad high court, where he was appearing in an unrelated case for graft, after he was served with an arrest warrant issued by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB).

Amid scuffles between security personnel and Khan’s supporters, the former cricket star was bundled into an armoured truck and driven away as soldiers clung to the sides of the vehicle, television footage aired by Pakistani news channels showed.

Khan was ousted in a no-confidence vote in April 2022. He has claimed the move was illegal and a Western conspiracy, and has campaigned against the government of his successor, Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, demanding early elections.

Khan had arrived in Islamabad earlier in the day from the nearby city of Lahore, where he lives, to face charges before the Islamabad High Court in multiple corruption cases against him. He has claimed that the string of cases, which include terrorism charges, are a plot by Sharif’s government to discredit him.

Fawad Chaudhry, a senior PTI official, said Khan was dragged out of the court and into a police vehicle. He denounced the arrest as “an abduction”.

Khan’s party has complained to the Islamabad High Court, which requested a police report explaining the charges for Khan’s arrest.

Previous attempts in April by Pakistani police to arrest Khan in Lahore and Islamabad for failing to answer court summons were foiled by the violent resistance of activists of his Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party, hundreds of whom have since been arrested.

In a video statement recorded before his arrest and released shortly afterwards, Khan said he had been implicated in a false case.

He added that his arrest showed that the fundamental rights granted to Pakistanis under the country’s constitution and its fragile democracy “have been buried”.

While ostensibly arrested on behalf of the NAB, the role of army-led paramilitary Rangers echoed an escalating war of words in recent days between Khan and Pakistan’s powerful army, long considered the country’s centre of power.

Khan’s detention also comes amid a battle of wills between Pakistan’s coalition government and the Supreme Court’s chief justice over the scheduling of polls in two of the country’s four provincial assemblies, following their dissolution in January by PTI-led administrations.

Additional reporting by AP