dpa
Islamabad
The Pakistani government will ban the party of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan, a top official said on Monday, stoking fears of more chaos in the nuclear-armed Islamic republic with a crisis-ridden economy.
“This country has to move forward. Pakistan and PTI (Khan’s party) can’t exist together,” Information Minister Atta Tarar said at a press conference in the capital Islamabad. The government would also initiate the process of charging Khan and two other aides under the country’s treasons laws, which carry the death sentence as the maximum penalty.
Faced with several graft charges since his ouster as prime minister in 2022 through a parliamentary vote of confidence, the former leader is already been in jail for almost a year. He was barred from running in the national elections early this year. But that did not stop his party from winning more seats than all other groups.
But Khan Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) could not form a government because two of his rivals - former premier Nawaz Sharif and ex-president Asif Zardari - teamed up to form a coalition. Tarar said all the partners in the multi-party coalition government have endorsed banning Khan’s party for rioting last year, when his supporters ransacked military installations in several cities at protests against his arrest.
The move comes days after the country’s Supreme Court ruled that the PTI must be allotted some of the seats in the parliament that are reserved for women and members of religious minorities.
The PTI was previously denied its share of the 70 reserve seats because Khan’s loyalists contested the national elections as independent candidates for a technical reason.
