Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Monday that the incumbent Army chief Gen Asim Munir was removed as the head of ISI in 2019 by his predecessor Imran Khan because the spy chief confronted him with proof of corruption involving his wife. Munir served as the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), after being replaced by Lt. Gen Faiz Hameed in 2019 when Khan was at the helm. “I say this with full responsibility that the incumbent Army chief (Munir) when he was the DG ISI, had told the then prime minister (Khan) that his wife Bushra Bibi was involved in corruption. He said this on the basis of facts," Prime Minister Sharif said while addressing the National Assembly on Monday.
“But obviously Khan got furious over it and did not like it. And the rest is history,” the premier said. Khan, the chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party in a recent tweet rejected the contents of a recent report by "The Daily Telegraph" newspaper in the UK, which claimed that Munir was removed by Khan due to personal differences. The report claimed that Khan removed Munir in June 2019, eight months after his appointment, because he wanted to investigate his wife and her circle for corruption. “The article claims that I had made Gen Asim resign as DG ISI because he had shown me my wife Bushra Begum’s corruption cases. This is completely false. Neither did Gen. Asim showed me any proof of my wife’s corruption nor did I make him resign because of that,” Khan tweeted.
On May 9, Khan, 70, was arrested by the paramilitary Pakistan Rangers in a corruption case while he was at the Islamabad High Court premises that triggered unrest across the country. For the first time in Pakistan's history, the protesters stormed the army headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi and also torched a corps commander's house in Lahore. Police put the death toll in violent clashes to 10, while Khan's party claims 40 of its workers lost their lives in the firing by security personnel. The National Assembly, the lower house of Pakistan's Parliament, on Monday passed a resolution vowing to try May 9 rioters, who were involved in attacks on military and state installations, under the existing laws including the Army Act and the Anti-Terrorism Act.
The resolution, which was moved by Defence Minister Khawaja Asif, was adopted by the House after a majority of lawmakers voted in favour of it. Khan, a cricketer-turned-politician, was ousted from power in April last year after losing a no-confidence vote in his leadership, which he alleged was part of a US-led conspiracy targeting him because of his independent foreign policy decisions on Russia, China and Afghanistan.
