ISLAMABAD: The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Saturday submitted its challan in the cypher case against former Prime Minister and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Imran Khan and ex-foreign minister and the party vice chairman Shah Mahmood Qureshi, declaring both of them as “guilty”.

The FIA, in its challan, submitted to an accountability court, claimed that the former Prime Minister and ex-foreign minister were found “guilty” in the matter and requested the court to conduct their trial and sentence them in the case.

However, PTI’s former secretary-general Asad Umar’s name has not been added to the list of accused. Whereas, the ex-Prime Minister’s former principal secretary Azam Khan has been named as a “strong witness” in the case and his statements, recorded under Sections 161 and 164, have been attached to the challan.

In the challan, the FIA has claimed that the former premier kept the cipher to himself and “misused the state secret”. It further claimed that Imran Khan Khan had a copy of the cipher but he did not return it to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The FIA has also given references of Imran Khan and Qureshi’s speeches while attaching transcripts of their speeches at a public rally in which the former premier brandished a piece of paper claiming it was a cipher from a foreign nation, which wanted his government to be removed from power through a “regime change conspiracy”. The FIA also submitted a list of 28 witnesses to the court with the challan after recording their statements under Section 161. Former foreign secretaries Dr Asad Majeed Khan and Sohail Mehmood as well as then additional foreign secretary Faisal Niaz Tirmizi’s names have also been added to the list of witnesses.

Meanwhile, rejecting the challan submitted by FIA, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) on Saturday demanded formation of a judicial commission to investigate the cipher case.

PTI spokesperson Raoof Hasan alleged that the challan submitted by the FIA was ‘meaningless and bogus as cipher case”.

The cipher was still present in its original state in the Foreign Office, he claimed adding, and “Cipher’s presence proves the allegations levelled against the former prime minister as baseless”.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023