PPP Sindh Council condemns Durrani’s arrest, raid on his house

The Sindh Council of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) on Saturday condemned the arrest of Sindh Assembly Speaker Agha Siraj Khan Durrani in Islamabad and the unfair treatment meted out to his family members during a raid on his residence in Karachi.

A meeting of the Sindh Council was held at the Sindh Chief Minister House here with the party’s Sindh chapter president, Nisar Ahmed Khuhro, in the chair.

The meeting was of the viewpoint that the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had not raided the residence of the speaker in Karachi, but in fact committed a robbery at his house as no official record was prepared of the articles seized from the place.

The meeting decided that the PPP would launch a phase-wise protest movement in the province to agitate against the arrest of the Sindh Assembly speaker and the raid on his house. In the first stage, the women and youth wings will hold protest in different districts of the province.

The resolutions adopted on the occasion expressed the hope that the chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, would get justice from the courts in contrast to his late predecessors in the party Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto who had not been delivered justice by the courts in the country.

The meeting condemned the current wave of accountability against the PPP leadership under the garb of this campaign, saying the party was being subjected to political victimisation.

It demanded that the ongoing organised campaign of victimization and character assassination of the leaders of the PPP, including Bilawal, Asif Ali Zardari, Faryal Talpur and Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah, should end immediately.

Speaking on the occasion, Khuhro said that the sanctity of the national institution was being violated by the incumbent prime minister himself. He said that only those politicians were being targeted under the current accountability drive who were against the present government set-up.

He said that the raiding team of NAB did not prepare any official seizure memo of the articles it confiscated from the residence of the speaker, and the incident was therefore simply an act of robbery by the accountability watchdog.

He said Durrani had been arrested at the same place from where earlier the dead bodies of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto had been sent to their native town in Sindh.