Personal disclosure: Imran says pre-poll fall saved him from death

Says losing control of his body was his greatest fear.

In a shocking disclosure to the British press, Imran Khan said that his pre-election fall from a lifter may have saved his life from the threat of an assassination bid.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf chief in his article for the Daily Mail said, “The fall that nearly killed me quite possibly saved my life”.

Imran suffered injuries as he fell off a lifter while being raised onto a stage to address a huge crowd gathered in Lahore’s Gulberg area on May 7. It took him three months to recover completely.

“I knew I was fortunate in more ways than one. The Almighty had been looking out for me that night. I could easily have sustained brain damage ... But there was something else, too:  if I hadn’t been in hospital I could have been dead. Pakistan’s home minister came to visit and told me of an assassination attempt scheduled for the day after my fall,” Imran wrote.

About his injuries, Imran said that the only thing he feared was that his injuries might lead to disability. “I’ve always been fit; I’m now 60 and I’ve never known a life where I wasn’t in control of my body. I found myself prey to morbid thoughts, something completely out of character. We always hear about the dead, not so much those who end up maimed. That was my great fear: not death, but being disabled”.

Elaborating his stance over drone strikes the PTI chief said the level of extremism that is now prevalent in the country is ‘unimaginable’ to anyone who knew the country a decade ago.

“Every time there is a drone strike, there are revenge bomb attacks in the settled areas and cities, especially in the K-P province,” he said.

Imran maintained that the approval of Musharraf’s government to carry out drone attacks in its territories had given extremists the justification to carry out attacks.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 29^th, 2013.