PESHAWAR: Though he has been expelled from the party, former provincial minister for mineral development Ziaullah Afridi here Wednesday insisted he was still part of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and waiting for the party chief Imran Khan to form a high-level inquiry committee to probe the charges that he made against Chief Minister Pervez Khattak during the recent session of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly. Ziaullah Afridi, a high-profile PTI activist who once won praise from Imran Khan and was considered close to a party leader Saifullah Niazi, has been in custody of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Ehtesab Commission on corruption charges since July 9. “I have been suffering from different diseases and was hospitalised at the Medico Legal ward of the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar and will spend Eidul Azha as a prisoner,” the former minister told The News. The court had granted him interim bail on August 24 but he was kept in the prison in two other cases of corruption. Ziaullah Afridi made his party leadership angry after delivering a fiery speech on the floor of the assembly and levelled corruption charges against Chief Minister Pervez Khattak. This prompted the PTI leadership to expel him from the party. However, Ziaullah Afridi claimed he had not been informed formally by the PTI leadership about his expulsion from the party. “I came to know about it through the media. They didn’t inform me about this decision,” he said. He said he was still associated with the PTI and would remain a worker of the party whether he was in jail or was freed. “I know the party chairman, Imran Khan, would have made the decision of my expulsion but this is not his personal property. This is our party. We spent our energies and suffered hardships to make a proper political party in the province from a small group of a few individuals,” he argued. According to sources in the PTI, Imran Khan had once referred to Ziaullah Afridi as his ‘tiger’ for the hard work he had done for the party in Peshawar. Ziaullah Afridi said he had joined the PTI and sincerely worked for it as he believed it would not remain the personal domain of a few individuals. “This is not a one-man party. There is a long list of sacrifices and struggle of many people behind this party,” he recalled, saying that Imran Khan has no right to summarily and unceremoniously expel him. According to Ziaullah Afridi, he would be willing to accept whatever punishment was given to him by a high-level party committee to be formed by Imran Khan to probe his charges against Pervez Khattak. “Since Imran is against corruption he should send his own people to meet me in the presence of senior journalists. They should listen to me and I will prove with written documents about corrupt people who part of the PTI government in the province,” the former minister maintained. According to PTI activists, some senior members of the party made efforts initially for a patch-up between Pervez Khattak and Ziaullah Afridi. However, sources close to Ziaullah Afridi told The News that he had refused to patch-up with the chief minister by arguing that Pervez Khattak had damaged his reputation as well as political career by implicating him in the corruption scandal. “Even then some of our people were trying to resolve this issue between Pervez Khattak and Ziaullah Afridi. We brought him to the provincial assembly session but the language he used there against Pervez Khattak damaged all efforts made for reconciliation,” a senior PTI leader in Peshawar told The News on condition of anonymity. He said Ziaullah Afridi’s blunt language and serious allegations had embarrassed and perturbed Pervez Khattak and that’s why he had to seek help of his ministers to tackle the former minister.
