PTI wants ex-army chief court-martialled

The PTI on Friday demanded that former army chief Gen (retd) Qamar Javed Bajwa should be held accountable for violating his oath, in the wake of ex-PML-N leader Muhammad Zubair’s claim that the retired general had started holding talks with party chief Nawaz Sharif two months prior to the PTI’s ouster from power.

In an interview with a private TV channel, Zubair, former Sindh governor and Punjab CM Maryam Nawaz’s spokesman, who parted ways with the PML-N, maintained that Nawaz and Gen (retd) Bajwa had even met a couple of times in London.

The PTI spokesperson in a statement called for bringing the former army chief to justice for “meeting a convict and conspiring with him against a democratically elected government”.

The party demanded that the former army chief should be court-martialled for “dragging the military into politics, tainting its reputation, and putting national security at risk”.

It added that PML-N President Nawaz should also be investigated for “aiding” the former army chief in the “conspiracy against democracy and an elected government”.

He continued that it had been proven that the “Jati Umra elites” were the main actors behind every conspiracy against the Constitution, law, democracy, and the sanctity of the people’s vote.

“Gen (retd) Qamar Javed Bajwa is a national criminal in every respect as he put the institution of army, country, Constitution and democracy at stake for his personal interest.”

The spokesperson claimed that all the evidence and testimonies that had been revealed since the regime change conspiracy point towards the “heinous character” of Gen (retd) Bajwa.

“After the cipher text sent by the Pakistani ambassador in Washington as well as the conspiracy to overthrow the elected democratic government and the events related to it, the testimony of Maryam Nawaz’s former spokesman confirms the unconstitutional, illegal and unconstitutional ambitions of Gen (retd) Qamar Javed Bajwa.”

The PTI demanded that the chief justice of Pakistan should take suo motu notice of Zubair’s interview and bring the former army chief, Nawaz as well as their accomplices in thid conspiracy to book.

However, Senator Irfan Siddiqui, the parliamentary party leader of the PML-N in the upper house of parliament, took to social media platform X to refute the claim.

“According to my confirmed information, since the court verdict in the Panama case i.e. since 28 July 2017 till today, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif has not met Gen (retd) Bajwa,” he wrote.

“Apart from a half-minute condolence on the death of Begum Kulsoom Nawaz, there has been no telephonic contact [between Nawaz and the ex-army chief] in the last seven years.”