Islamabad, Pakistan – Police in Pakistan have filed a report into last week’s attack on former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was shot and wounded in the leg during a protest march. But it has been criticised as a “mockery” by his party.
The authorities in the eastern province of Punjab, where the shooting took place, filed what is known as a first information report (FIR) on Monday following orders from the country’s Supreme Court.
The court questioned the top official in the Punjab police on Monday and issued a warning to register an FIR within 24 hours.
The police report was filed under anti-terror laws and named Naveed Ahmed as the suspected attacker. He was arrested at the site of the attack on November 3.
Leaders of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party criticised the police report as a “mockery of justice”.
“It is a meaningless FIR. It is not even worth the paper it’s written on,” PTI official Asad Umar told Al Jazeera.
“We do not accept it in its current shape and form and we will pursue all avenues to seek justice,” he added.
Ejaz Chaudhary, another senior party official who was with Khan on the container when the attack took place, said it was an apt reflection of the state of affairs in Pakistan where a former prime minister was finding it difficult to get a police case registered.
“The most popular leader of the country gets attacked in broad daylight and yet he cannot get a case registered. He has been requesting for days yet police were just giving lame excuses,” Chaudhary told Al Jazeera.
Khan, 70, was leading his march on the capital, to demand elections, from Punjab’s Wazirabad city along with a large number of supporters when he was shot at. He recovered in a Lahore hospital for three days before being discharged on Sunday.
One person was killed in the attack and 13 were wounded.
On Friday, the former cricketer-turned-politician named Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, interior minister Rana Sanaullah and a senior military official, Major General Faisal Naseer, as the main accused behind the “plot to assassinate” him. He did not provide any evidence.
The police report does not mention the names of the three people Khan accused.
Sharif has denied the allegations made against him and asked the country’s top court to form a commission to investigate the attack.
The military on Friday called Khan’s accusations against its key official “baseless and irresponsible”.
Former minister Shafqat Mahmood, another PTI leader, tweeted his condemnation of the police report, and wrote it was a “complete distortion of law”.
“Not registering FIR as per the demand of the complainant is a complete distortion of law and unacceptable. By this one act our entire legal framework has been turned upside down. SC must take notice of this travesty,” he tweeted on Tuesday, referring to the Supreme Court.
The long march, which began on October 28 from Lahore, is set to resume on November 10.
Umar, the party’s general secretary, told Al Jazeera that while they had planned to restart the march on Tuesday, they had to change dates because of the delay in registering the police report.
“We were going to go ahead on Tuesday and even made [the] announcement. But due to the FIR situation, we had to change plans and now we are starting it from [the] same spot on Thursday,” he said.
Khan was removed as prime minister following a parliamentary vote of no confidence in April.
He has since been holding public rallies and called for early elections. The term of the current National Assembly ends in October 2023.
The coalition government has so far rejected his demands and has said that the elections will take place as scheduled.
