🇵🇰 Islamabad is slowly turning itself into a fortress this week. And the scale is extraordinary.
1,500 shipping containers are being positioned around Islamabad against PTI’s September 27 march demanding Imran Khan’s release.
Police are preparing for tens of thousands of protesters. Thousands of additional security personnel are being brought in. Roads and entry points are already being sealed.
They are preparing for a political march by physically rebuilding the entrance to its own capital.
Pakistan’s confrontation with Imran Khan is no longer confined to courtrooms, prison cells or parliament...
Now it's literally running against kilometres of blocked roads between his supporters and the capital.
@PTIofficial / Writer: Oliver
کہتی ہے پنجاب کی ماں ہے
پنجاب میں اس کی پولیس جس کے بارے میں اس نے عوام کو ڈرامہ کیا تھا کہ یہ آپ جناب کرکے بات کیا کریں گے، وہی پولیس کی یونیفارم میں غنڈے بن کر راتوں کو عورتوں کا لحاظ کئے بغیر، پردہ کا لحاظ کئے بغیر کم سن بچوں کو اٹھا رہے ہیں۔
ان کے بارے بات بھی کریں تو عورت کارڈ لے کر رونا دھونا شروع ہوجاتا ہے۔ پنجاب کی ماں نہیں، ڈائن ہے یہ اور اسکو لانے والے آدم خور ہیں۔
#ستمبر27_مارچ_ہو_کر_رہے_گا
🚨🇵🇰 Pakistan just LOCKED DOWN the capital to stop Imran Khan’s (many) supporters...
Authorities have deployed nearly 35,000 extra security personnel and blocked MAJOR highways with shipping containers, ahead of a planned march on Islamabad.
They've also detained HUNDREDS of PTI activists, including 3 of Khan’s sisters.
Two key roads linking the capital to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have been entirely closed off.
Khan’s party says the protest will go ahead anyway...
The former PM remains in jail, with serious concerns over his health and a belief among many that the cases against him are politically motivated...
Hard to see it any other way.
Source: Reuters / Writer: Samuel
WTF IS GOING ON IN PAKISTAN!
They arrest the former Prime Minister Imran Khan, put him in solitary confinement for years, do the same to his wife, then start arresting his family
And now arrest his sister, who's in her 70s, because she's speaking out in support of her brother! the former PRIME MINISTER!!!
Enough is enough! THE FAMILY HAS BEEN THROUGH ENOUGH!
Cricket legend Imran Khan is rotting to death in a tiny jail cell in Pakistan. It's time Britain used its influence to help free him
https://t.co/Yf5eCx2fAi
Exclusive: As the great former cricketer languishes in a 6ft-by-8ft prison cell in Pakistan, his family are in an agonising state of limbo
🔗 https://t.co/D7XWxFWamu
Adding my support here to GC and the other former international captains. I hope the court ordered medical assessment be allowed to run its course, and that family visits continue. I hope Imran Khan is treated with the dignity anyone deserves
Prime Minister @andyburnham and Foreign Secretary @Ed_Miliband : how much longer will Britain remain silent?
For three years the father of my two sons, and Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, has been brutally penalised by his political opponents, in a personal vendetta by Army Chief, Asim Munir, which according to the UN, amounts to torture and which is now taking a potentially fatal toll on his physical and mental health.
He has endured 3 years of solitary confinement. For nearly ten months now his family has been denied contact with him. He has been deprived of the most basic human contact, denied access to books, lawyers and doctors.
The international human-rights standards are unequivocal. Under the UN’s Nelson Mandela Rules, solitary confinement lasting more than 15 consecutive days is prohibited and amounts to torture.
He has endured this treatment not for 15 days, but for three years.
Pakistan’s own Supreme Court has now intervened: ordering comprehensive medical treatment, access to his personal doctor, regular family visits and twice-weekly calls with his sons.
Yet those orders are being defied.
This is no longer simply a Pakistani political matter. It is a human-rights emergency.
He has deep and lifelong ties to Britain. He studied at Oxford University, captained Oxford University cricket and spent years playing county cricket in England. His relationship with this country stretches back more than half a century. His charitable activities were internationally recognised, and include building the only free cancer hospital in Pakistan as well as a university.
His sons, my two boys, Sulaiman and Kasim, are British citizens. They have been forced to watch their father’s health decline from thousands of miles away, prevented from visiting him, denied visas, publicly threatened by government officials with arrest themselves, and even denied court-mandated regular phone calls.
I have repeatedly appealed to the UK government to intervene. Purported attempts at back channelling have evidently failed. The previous Foreign Secretary @DavidLammy informed me in writing that Britain would not intervene if my sons, British citizens, are arrested when they travel to Pakistan to visit their father.
@FCDOGovUK: Britain must now speak out publicly and unequivocally. Demand that Pakistan comply with its own Supreme Court; restore Imran Khan’s medical access, his right to see his family, end his prolonged isolation and uphold his fundamental human rights.
Pakistan is a Commonwealth country. Britain has a long and proud tradition of standing against arbitrary detention, inhumane treatment and the denial of fundamental rights. Those principles mean very little if we invoke them only selectively and neglect them when inconvenient.
This an appeal to the new Burnham government to please now do the right thing.
Relatives of former Pakistani PM Imran Khan say he’s being tortured in prison after he was returned to Adiala Jail hours after a court-ordered medical examination on Friday.