Former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his daughter Maryam, sentenced to jail for corruption, are likely to be arrested on their arrival in Lahore this evening, reports said.
“Sharif and his daughter Maryam, who were given a seven-year sentence by the same court, won’t be allowed to leave the airport”, Information Minister Syed Ali Zafar said in broadcast comments.
“He is convicted, so he has to be arrested first and can’t be allowed to roam around in the city,” he said.
Over 10,000 police officers have been posted in Lahore for what is expected to be a dramatic homecoming for the three-time prime minister who wants to mobilise his party ahead of general elections on July 25. The administration has ordered that mobile phones will be shut in the city from 3 pm to 12 am.
The dramatic return by Sharif before the 25 July national election follows a two-year corruption scandal that engulfed Pakistani politics after the leak of the so-called Panama Papers showed his family used offshore accounts to buy high-end London apartments. The former premier was disqualified from the top job by the Supreme Court last July, his third ousting since the 1990s.
A team of Pakistan’s National Accountability Bureau is expected to be on the flight taken by the Sharifs, so they can be arrested before they land in Lahore.
“Nawaz Sharif is coming back to fulfil his promise to the masses,” his younger brother Shehbaz said on Twitter. “He knows that he will be put behind bars.”
“I’ll be taken straight to jail. But I’m doing this for people of Pak, sacrificing for generations to come. Such an opportunity won’t come again. Let’s build the destiny of Pakistan together,” Nawaz Sharif said at the Abu Dhabi airport.
The Sharif family has consistently denied any wrong doing and has criticized the judiciary’s handling of his case. Sharif said the nation’s powerful military — which removed him in a 1999 coup — has conspired to manipulate the vote against his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party in favour of his main political rival Imran Khan. On Wednesday, Sharif told reporters in London that the military’s main spy agency has intimidated the PML-N’s election candidates and has told them to switch parties or run as independents.
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