● Info minister says he’s unaware if Imran Khan met Robin Raphael
● Seemingly disregarding accusations of conspiracy against the US, says PTI wants to friends
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s former information minister Fawad Chaudhry at a press conference on Monday accused Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s PDM government of conspiring to have Imran Khan assassinated and of wanting to fan religious strife in Pakistan, which he said was evident from “the fact that the incumbent government was the only one ever in Pakistan to make blasphemy cases against the opposition.”
Fawad was noncommittal at the press conference in Pakistan’s federal capital with Sania Nishtar, former special assistant to Imran Khan when he was prime minister, on whether his political party PTI chairman Imran Khan met former US diplomat Robin Raphael at his Bani Gala house in this capital city the other day.
Fawad said, “So what if Robin Raphael is in Pakistan, she has retired and has nothing to do with the US government.”
In a startling departure from his PTI’s bilious harangue against the US for “conspiring against” the PTI’s electorally ousted government, the former minister said that the PTI wants diplomatic relations with the United States based on “equality”.
Asked at the conference if Pakistan would default in its economy (because of the devastating floods), he said the PTI would form an economic committee led by the PTI’s former finance minister Shaukat Tareen to sort economic matters out.
But in the same vein he said the destruction in the Balochistan and Sindh provinces was very high whereas the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Punjab provinces’ infrastructure (the latter two where the PTI was in government) was much better, much to the consternation of the press at the conference who have been reporting how hotels, shops and entire towns were swept away by unprecedented flash floods of devastating proportions in most parts of KP and how vast swathes of cultivated land and entire villages were swept away in Punjab.
