MIANWALI: Former prime minister and PTI Chairman Imran Khan has claimed that a plan has been devised “behind closed doors” to have him assassinated and accused four people of being part of the plot.

Hours after a fresh audio tape, purportedly of Mr Khan, surfaced on Friday, he addressed a charged crowd at Qamar Mushani, 55km away from Mianwali.

He said PML-N leaders Javed Latif and Marriyum Aurangzeb addressed a press conference, accusing him of committing blasphemy.

“What is the game behind it? The game is that .. four people have devised a plan behind closed doors .. They have decided to accuse me of blasphemy and then if someone killed me, they will call it an act of a lone religious fanatic as I had committed blasphemy.”

However, he warned that he has already recorded a video and whenever something happened to him the video tape will be released, revealing the name of those four people whom he has accused.

PTI chief hints at movement to court arrests, calls audios and videos ‘deep fakes’

“I will be in my akhrat (afterlife) but the nation will not forget those four people,” he warned.

Talking about his plans for the upcoming long march, Mr Khan claimed that the government was threatening his followers and party workers with arrests, but warned that they are not scared of it.

He added that he was about to start a movement of voluntary arrests which would overwhelm the country’s prisons.

“Your prisons can accommodate 70,000 people, but here I have millions waiting to be arrested,” said Mr Khan.

Touching upon the issue of leaked audio, Mr Khan called it “a new game introduced by the PML-N ‘’. However, he did not comment on the veracity of his purported conversation with other party leaders.

Mr Khan said it was not difficult to make fake videos and audios and called PML-N Vice President Maryam Nawaz Sharif “a specialist in making such audios and videos”.

He showed a ‘deep fake’ video of PML-N supremo Nawaz Sharif, accepting the ownership of offshore companies and the properties abroad, and said he could make such videos of all PML-N leaders.

However, he said that leaked conversations from the Prime Minister’s Office was a matter of concern and held the intelligence agencies responsible for the leaks.

“If everything is being leaked from the PM Office, then the responsibility lies with you [intelligence agencies]. You should understand that .. calling and threatening people from unknown numbers, picking up social media [influencers] and doing political engineering .. is not your job,” he said, adding that the job of intelligence agencies was to secure the Prime Minister’s Office.

Mr Khan also reiterated his allegations against Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and the incumbent government and called them “imported” and “subservient to the United States”.

He said that the prime minister has not ordered a probe into the US cipher, which he has been demanding for the past six months.

“We even sent a copy of the cipher to the chief justice to probe the conspiracy against Pakistan,” he said.

Before finishing his speech, Mr Khan once again asked the crowd to raise their right hands and take an oath.

Reading after PTI leader Aslam Iqbal, the crowd took the oath “to uphold the Constitution and stand with Imran Khan for haqeeqi azadi (true independence)”.

Published in Dawn, October 8th, 2022