Senior PTI leaders including President Arif Alvi acquitted in Parliament attack case

ISLAMABAD: Senior leaders of the ruling PTI including President Arif Alvi and federal ministers have been acquitted in the Parliament and PTV attack case.

The party's top leaders Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Asad Umar, Shafqat Mehmood and Pervez Khattak, Shaukat Yousufzai, Aleem Khan, Jahangir Tareen, Aijaz Chauhdry were among those declared innocent by the ATC Judge Mohammad Ali Warraich on Tuesday.

Islamabad Police had filed a case against PTI leaders including PM Imran Khan in 2014 for inciting violence. During the months-long sit-in against the PML-N government, PTI and Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) workers had clashed with the police at Constitution Avenue.

On September 1, 2014, hundreds of protesters from the PTI and the Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) camps had allegedly ransacked the office of the state-run TV and Parliament House premises and brutally beaten up a senior police official, less than 24 hours into his first day on the job as SSP Operations.

According to details, the prosecution had said that three people were killed and 26 injured, while 60 were arrested in the case. It had submitted 65 photographs, sticks, cutters, etc, to the court to establish its case.

PM Imran Khan was acquitted by the court earlier in the case.

President Arif Alvi had earlier this month declined to claim immunity and requested the court to acquit him in the case for want of evidence under Section 265-K of the Criminal Procedure Code.

During the hearing on March 4, the president had filed an appeal stating that he would not be availing his immunity and said that Islam does not allow pardons.

"I have tried to read Islamic history. There is no space for a pardon; I am bound by the Constitution of Pakistan. The Holy Quran is a bigger law than the Constitution," Alvi had said.

The president had argued that the Constitution allows him to avail immunity, but he would not take it up.

"All the caliphs appeared in court with great dignity."

The president had said he got to know in 2016 that he had been charged in the case pertaining to the ransacking of the Parliament and state-run TV.

Alvi said he had taken bail from the same court a few years back, as he urged the judiciary to wrap up the cases at the earliest.

"I request the entire judiciary to close at the earliest as once a case is filed, the next generation carries it on [due to delays]. My father filed a case in 1977 and it is going on till date," he had said.