In a major development, senior Pakistani journalist and TV host Imran Riaz Khan was arrested in Lahore for his “controversial statements”, Geo News reported Thursday.<\/p>\n
The arrest comes hours after Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) ally Sheikh Rashid Ahmed was nabbed by the Islamabad Police.<\/p>\n
Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the agency’s team detained Riaz from Allama Iqbal International Airport while he was boarding a flight to Dubai.<\/p>\n
Sources said that the FIA will present the journalist before a local court in Lahore to seek his custody.<\/p>\n
Reacting to the development, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) condemned the arrest saying that they “can safely [say] that human rights are completely non-existent in Pakistan”. <\/p>\n
“Imran Riaz Khan has been taken into custody by the FIA. We can safely say that human rights are completely non existent in Pakistan, a fascist state where rule of law is absent!” a post on the party’s Twitter handle stated. <\/p>\n
The tweet also contained a video from the “place Riaz had been taken to”.<\/p>\n
PTI leader Asad Umar also condemned the arrests, claiming that terrorists were roaming free while Sheikh Rashid Ahmed and Imran Riaz are behind bars. <\/p>\n
This wasn’t the first time Riaz was kept from leaving the country as the authorities offloaded the televangelist from a Dubai-bound flight last year on July 15 as well. because his name was added to a black list due to being booked in several sedition cases.<\/p>\n
Earlier, in the same month, Riaz was also arrested in Attock in one of the 17 treason cases registered against him across Punjab.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a major development, senior Pakistani journalist and TV host Imran Riaz Khan was arrested in Lahore for his “controversial statements”, Geo News reported Thursday. The arrest comes hours after Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) ally Sheikh Rashid Ahmed was nabbed by the Islamabad Police. Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":112931,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,23,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-islamabad","category-national","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=112930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112932,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112930\/revisions\/112932"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/112931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=112930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=112930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=112930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}