Widow of slain Haroon Bilour wins by-election

ISLAMABAD: The wife of Awami National Party's (ANP) Haroon Bilour, who was martyred in a Taliban suicide attack during campaigning, won her husband’s provincial seat in by-elections as the ruling party of Prime Minister Imran Khan retained its slim majority in parliament.

Samar Bilour on Sunday won the provincial assembly seat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province that her husband Haroon, a member of the ANP, had been scheduled to contest in July.



Haroon was martyred along with 19 others in a suicide attack in Peshawar, the provincial capital, claimed by the Pakistani Taliban weeks before the July 25 polls. The attack prompted a delay in voting for that seat.

Haroon's father, senior ANP leader Bashir Bilour, was killed in a suicide bombing in the run-up to Pakistan’s last election in 2013.

Sunday’s by-elections were for 24 seats across the four provincial assemblies and 11 in the National Assembly. Most of the national parliamentary seats were open because a candidate is allowed to contest in multiple constituencies, but can only keep one seat.



Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) won four out of 11 parliamentary seats contested, retaining its slim majority in the National Assembly.

After Sunday’s vote, the PTI and its coalition partners held a slim three-seat majority of 174 seats in the 342-seat parliament. Khan’s ruling coalition in the Parliament elected him prime minister by 176 votes in August.

But the PTI lost two of the four constituencies originally won by Khan, while former premier Nawaz Sharif’s opposition Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) made marginal gains by adding four seats.



PML-N’s Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, who served as the prime minister after Nawaz was removed from office by the Supreme Court last year, was among those elected to parliament after missing out in the July elections.