Courtesy PID
Former federal minister Shireen Mazari was arrested by the Punjab Anti-Corruption Establishment (ACE) on Saturday over a case related to land encroachment in Rajanpur.
Confirming the arrest, Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir—the daughter of Mazari, who is also a senior leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf—said that male policemen had beaten up her mother before taking her away. “All I have been told is that Anti-Corruption Wing Lahore has taken her,” she said in a posting on Twitter.
Video footage of the arrest, however, shows Mazari being pulled out of her car by a woman officer. She can also be seen resisting and accusing the cops of manhandling her.
Speaking with media outside Islamabad’s Kohsar Police Station, former information minister Chaudhry Fawad Hussain described the detention as a “grave human rights violation” and condemned it. Imaan, meanwhile, said it was a “kidnapping,” not an arrest. “She was kidnapped—I won’t say she was arrested,” she said alongside the PTI’s Chaudhry Fawad Hussain and Shibli Faraz. “When someone is arrested, the police inform you on what charge [they are] taken away,” she added.
“I don’t know where she is. She has been forcibly disappeared by this government because they think women are soft targets,” she alleged. “I won’t spare this government if anything happens to my mother,” she added.
According to a copy of First Information Report against Mazari, available with Newsweek, the detention is in relation to a case of land grabbing from 1972—when the accused was 6 years old. She was declared an accused by a Joint Investigation Team on April 13 after a probe that was initiated by the ACE in March 2022 when the PTI’s Usman Buzdar was still chief minister of Punjab.
The PTI has announced that it would approach the Islamabad High Court to secure Mazari’s release.
The detention has been condemned by political leaders from both the PTI and PPP. The PTI has also called for nationwide protests at 7 p.m. to demonstrate against the arrest of a woman politician.