Six more Adiala jail employees ‘arrested for aiding’ Imran

RAWALPINDI: After arresting a former jail deputy superintendent, law enforcement agencies (LEAs) have taken six more employees of the Adiala jail into custody for allegedly aiding Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) founder Imran Khan, sources told Geo News on Tuesday.

The sources said three members of the jail employees’ network involved in alleged facilitation of the former prime minister were women. The LEAs will investigate these workers. The aforementioned employees included a sweeper, two lady wardens and three officials posted on monitoring surveillance cameras in the jail premises, they said.

The sources said the female staff passed on messages between Imran and his wife Bushra Bibi in the prison, adding cell phones of all those employees were confiscated as well.

Meanwhile, they said, manpower for monitoring of the Adiala jail had also been increased. The sources, on August 14, said that the former deputy superintendent of Adiala jail Muhammad Akram had been taken into custody on charges of aiding the incarcerated PTI founder.

Akram was removed from his post on June 20, while Deputy Superintendent Judicial Tahir Siddique Shah replaced him as security supervisor of Imran. The Punjab home department (prison section), through a notification, had removed Muhammad Akram, directing him to leave the charge and report to the Prisons Department, Lahore.

The sources had said Akram would allegedly convey the jailed PTI founder’s messages outside the prison facility secretly. They said the LEAs had formally informed the inspector general of prisons, Punjab, regarding the senior police officer’s arrest and probe. The 71-year-old cricketer-turned-politician has been in prison for more than a year after he was booked in plethora of cases, including the Toshakhana case, cipher case, and the un-Islamic marriage case.

His wife, Bushra Bibi, has also been behind bars for months. However, a court suspended his sentence in the Toshakhana case, while other courts overturned his convictions in the cipher and iddat cases, respectively.

While there were hopes for Khan and Bushra’s release in July, they were dashed when the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) arrested them on fresh charges related to the sale of state gifts.

The chances of Imran’s release from jail further dimmed after the Lahore Police declared his arrest in several cases related to the May 9, 2023, riots, that erupted after his detainment from from Islamabad High Court (IHC) premises last year in which protesters targeted government and military installations.