Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Friday said he was hit by four bullets in his right leg during the assassination attempt a day earlier when he was leading a political march in Punjab province.
Addressing the nation from the Shaukat Khanum Hospital here, his first address since the assassination attempt, Khan said that he was aware of the plot to kill him.
“I’ll come to the details of the attack later. I got to know the day before [the attack] that either in Wazirabad or Gujrat, they planned to kill me,” the 70-year-old chief of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party claimed.
“I was hit by four bullets,” Khan said.
Khan said he had narrated this plan to the public during a September 24 rally.
“This [the attempted assassination] happened exactly according to the script,” he said.
Dr Faisal Sultan, who is treating the cricketer-turned-politician, said X-rays of Khan’s right leg showed that his tibia was damaged and in fact fractured.
“In this scan, the line you see on the right leg is the main artery. The bullet fragments were very near it,” Sultan said.
Khan suffered a bullet injury on the right leg when a gun-wielding man fired a volley of bullets at him and others mounting on a container-mounted truck in the Wazirabad area of Punjab province.
Khan has been demanding fresh elections and launched a long march to Islamabad on October 28 to press the government to accept his demands.
Angry supporters
Imran’s angry supporters took to the streets across Pakistan after Friday prayers asthe Punjab police arrested two more suspects.
While Khan’s PakistanTehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party insisted that it was a “prelude to a well-thought-out conspiracy”, the federal government asked the Punjab provincial government to constitute a high-level joint investigation team (JIT) to bring the facts to light.
Protests by PTI workers erupted in various cities across the country after the Friday prayers.
Irate protesters blocked the busy Murree Road, the main artery of Rawalpindi which leads to Islamabad.
They also clashed with police at the Faizabad interchange, which connects Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Protests were witnessed outside Governor House in Lahore, with TV footage showing protesters trying to scale the gates of the premises.
