Pakistan

PML-N leader Malik Ahmad Khan said on Friday that former army chief retired General Qamar Javed Bajwa had advised the then-opposition to withdraw the vote of no-confidence (VONC) against former prime minister Imran Khan. His statement comes a day after Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman claimed that Gen Bajwa and ex-spymaster Lt Gen Faiz Hameed, who was the then-Peshawar corps …

KARACHI: Less than a week after winning the election on a Sindh Assembly seat in Karachi, Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf-backed independent candidate Ejaz Swati switched sides and announced on Wednesday joining the Pakistan Peoples Party. Mr Swati had emerged victorious from PS-88 in district Malir. He is also the district president of the PTI. In a video statement, the MPA-elect said that …

ISLAMABAD: The Su­­preme Court on Wednes­day approved bail for an individual accused of blasphemy, Zubair Saeed Sabri, who has been detained for the past seven months. The bail was set against a surety bond of Rs50,000, with a direction that due to the sensitivity of the matter, a senior police officer not below the rank of a superintendent of police …

QUETTA: The traffic remained suspended for several hours on Wednesday on all highways linking Balochistan with other provinces and Afghanistan as protest sit-ins and highways’ blockade at several places continued in several parts of Balochistan against the alleged rigging in Feb 8 general elections. The National Highways and roads have been blockaded at several places in the province on the …

ISLAMABAD: In absolute numbers, more people voted in the Feb 8 polls than in 2018 – but since the number of registered voters this time around was higher, the turnout actually went down from 52pc in the last general elections to around 48pc this time around. These were the top lines of a turnout analysis, released by the Free and Fair Election …

QUETTA: As the protests against alleged rigging in the election intensified in several parts of the country, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leaders and the candidates who won the national and provincial assembly seats from Balochistan at a joint presser announced that the party would form a coalition government, led by a jiyala chief minister. It was unfortunate that defeated candidates and their parties …

Voting concluded at several polling stations in Punjab’s Khushab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Kohat and Sindh’s Ghotki, as scheduled by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) for Thursday. In a statement on Feb 10, the ECP had said that elections would be reconducted in 26 polling stations of NA-88 (Khushab-II) as the “polling material had been burned by a crowd in the …

ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court called for a commitment from the federal government to ensure the armed forces exclusively focus on defence-related matters rather than commercial activities. The assurance was sought by Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Qazi Faez Isa, who was heading a three-judge bench in a case scrutinising the use of military lands for business purposes. The matter was …

The Foreign Office (FO) said on Thursday that the electoral process in Pakistan was an internal sovereign affair and the nation was committed to upholding its constitutional obligations. The remarks were passed by FO spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch in response to media queries regarding the global response to the February 8 election, state-run Radio Pakistan reported. Nearly 60.6 million Pakistanis voted in …

PTI leader Barrister Gohar Khan on Thursday said former premier Imran Khan had nominated Omer Ayub as the candidate for prime minister while Mian Aslam Iqbal was picked for the slot of Punjab chief minister. The development came after Barrister Gohar and other PTI leaders held a flurry of meetings with the imprisoned party chief at Adiala Jail to discuss …