I will tell tomorrow when long march will reach Islamabad: Imran Khan

LAHORE, Nov 18 (SABAH): Former prime minister and Chairman Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)  Imran Khan on Friday said he will announce the arrival date of the party’s long march in Rawalpindi tomorrow (Saturday) as the former premier addressed the march’s participants via video link.

After suffering a bullet wound to the leg in an attempted assassination bid, Imran Khan said he will rejoin the party’s Haqeeqi Azadi march once it enters the garrison city of Rawalpindi.

The party chief said he will be consulting his doctors today, adding that he will set a date for the long march’s arrival in Islamabad accordingly.

Taking a dig at rival party supremo Nawaz Sharif, Imran Khan questioned how a person like him could be permitted to decide when the election will be held and who the next chief of army staff should be. “The person whose children are sitting in Britain,” said Imran, “how can he decide for Pakistan?”

“General Asif Nawaz’s brother has written in his book that in 1992 when he [Nawaz] was prime minister, he tried to bribe the general with a BMW in Murree’s Governor House,” he continued, “which was rejected”.

“Why did he do that?” lambasted Imran, claiming that Nawaz wanted to escape accountability and that is why he wanted to appoint an army chief of his liking and attempted to bribe him.

“He [Nawaz] has no idea how to play with a neutral empire,” said Imran. Imran also predicted that Nawaz will ask the army chief to “first of all try to get rid of me, because he [Nawaz] cannot compete with me”, and then “he will try to finish all corruption cases against him. And finally, he will never hold elections until he knows for sure he will win.” “Things were not this bad even when the country was under martial law under Pervez Musharraf,” he exclaimed.

The PTI chief also questioned during his address that if the largest political party cannot get justice in Pakistan, then who can as he pointed towards the difficulty he and his party faced in registering an FIR over the gun attack on him.

Imran said prosperity is necessarily dependent upon justice” as he asserted that hard-working Pakistanis were leaving the country to seek economic security because the system is not just.

“Whenever I ask overseas Pakistanis why they do not do business in Pakistan they tell me that they do not have faith in the system,” he added.