Pakistan’s government will ban the party of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan, a senior official said Monday, stoking fears of more chaos in the Islamic republic with nuclear weapons and an economic crisis zone.
“This country has to move forward. Pakistan and PTI (Khan’s party) cannot exist together,” Information Minister Atta Tarar told a news conference in the capital Islamabad.
The government would also initiate proceedings to charge Khan and two other associates under the country’s treason laws, which carry the death penalty as the maximum punishment.
The former leader was accused of corruption in a 2022 confidence vote in parliament and has been in prison for almost a year.
He was barred from running in the national elections earlier this year, but that didn’t stop his party from winning more seats than any other group.
But Khan Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) could not form a government because two of his rivals – former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and former President Asif Zardari – formed a coalition together.
Tarar said all partners in the multi-party coalition government supported the ban on Khan’s party over riots last year, in which his supporters ransacked military installations in several cities during protests against his arrest.
The decision comes days after the country’s Supreme Court ruled that the PTI should be given a portion of seats in parliament reserved for women and members of religious minorities.
Earlier, the PTI was denied a share of the 70 reserve seats because Khan’s loyalists contested the national elections as independent candidates, on a technicality.
Pakistan received a $7 billion bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) over the weekend to help steer the economy out of crisis after nearly a decade of chaos.
