Pakistan ex-PM Imran Khan barred from election candidacy: party
Imran Khan and most of his supporters have been rejected as candidates for the February 8 election, party officials said Sunday after nominations for the ballot closed.
Khan has been in prison since August, facing trial over a slew of cases he insists have been orchestrated to prevent him from contesting the election as the figurehead of his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. The former cricket star was found guilty of graft earlier this year, but a court suspended his three-year sentence and the conviction is being appealed.
The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) disqualified him from office over the conviction, but PTI turned in nomination papers for Khan last week regardless.
«Nomination papers of almost all national and provincial leaders of PTI, including Imran Khan, have been rejected,» said PTI spokesman Raoof Hasan. «90 to 95 percent of our candidates' papers have been rejected.»
Hasan told AFP candidates were being blocked as part of an «agenda» to prevent PTI from contesting the election in six weeks. «All tactics are being tried for this purpose but, under any circumstances, we will not leave the political ground and will not boycott the elections,» he said.
An election commission official confirmed to AFP that various PTI candidates had been rebuffed including Khan, based on his conviction. Such widespread action against a single party is «unprecedented» in Pakistan, political analyst Hasan Askari told AFP.
«This is the first time in the country's history that a political party has been excluded from the electoral process on such a large scale even before the election,» he said. State institutions want to keep PTI from contesting polls «at
