After Maryam Nawaz’s anti-military speech, her husband is arrested, released

ISLAMABAD: Hours after former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s daughter, Maryam Nawaz, took the military establishment head on at a rally of opposition parties in Karachi, police personnel barged into her hotel room in the port city in the early hours of Monday and arrested her husband, Capt

Muhammad Safdar

(Retd).

He was released on bail later in the day. “I was in the room, sleeping, when they (police) barged in and arrested Safdar,” Maryam posted on Twitter.

An FIR was registered against Safdar for raising slogans at Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s mausoleum in Karachi.

A day earlier Maryam, along with Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leaders and workers, had entered the Jinnah mausoleum to offer fateha (prayers) and lay a floral wreath on his grave. As soon as it ended, Safdar and the PML-N workers started chanting the slogan “Vote ko izzat do (Honour the vote)”, which was against the mausoleum’s protocol.

The complainant, Waqas Ahmed, alleged that the PML-N leaders, along with 200 of their followers, reached Jinnah’s grave where Safdar jumped over the grill surrounding it. The complainant claimed that he tried to stop him from doing so but Safdar “got out of control” and started threatening him and others that he would kill them. He alleged that Safdar later damaged government property before leaving the site.

The PML-N and other opposition leaders claimed that Safdar’s arrest was a “sting operation by the state” carried out to damage the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), an alliance of 11 opposition parties formed to oust the Imran Khan-led government.

Addressing a press conference along with Maryam and other opposition leaders,

Maulana Fazlur Rehman

, the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (F) chief and PDM president, said this arrest was “done through a conspiracy to create differences between the PML-N and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP)” but the government failed to create a rift between the opposition parties.

Rehman claimed that the Sindh police chief, after he refused to take any action against Safdar, was “kidnapped”, “kept hostage for four hours” and made to register the FIR.

Defending the slogans being raised at Jinnah’s mausoleum, Maryam said: “We all know who (a reference to the military establishment) hates the “Vote ko izzat do (Honour the vote)” slogan. We all know who these namaloom afraad (unidentified people) (a veiled reference to the ISI) are.”