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The shocking confessions appear to lend weight to allegations made by Imran Khan that the military falsified the vote count in dozens of elections.
By Zia Your-Rehman
Reporting from Karachi, Pakistan
A senior Pakistani official admitted on Saturday that he had helped manipulate the effects of the country’s election, an unexpected claim that reinforced the sense that the vote was among the least credible in Pakistan’s history and deepened the turmoil that has gripped the country since others went to the election. surveys. this month.
The official, Liaquat Ali Chatha, is a senior administrative official in Punjab province and oversees Rawalpindi, a garrison in the city where the army is headquartered, and three adjacent districts. He said he would resign from his post and turn himself in to the police. .
“We have turned losers into winners, reversing the 70,000-vote margins of independent candidates for thirteen seats in the national parliament,” he told a press convention on Saturday, referring to the shift in votes for independent candidates aligned with Imran Khan, the former prime minister whose party led the party. The army had tried to stay away before the vote. He reported that other senior officials had been concerned about the mission and said he was unable to sleep at night after “stabbing the country in the back. “
Chatha’s admission comes just over a week after Pakistanis went to the polls for the first time since Chatha went to the polls. Khan fell out with the army and was expelled from parliament in 2022. But Khan-aligned candidates won more seats than any other party, even if they didn’t win an undeniable majority.
Khan was not on the ballot, jailed and disqualified from running for office following convictions for crimes that his supporters said were falsified, but the victory was obviously his. This is one of the biggest upheavals in electoral history in Pakistan, where the military has manipulated electoral effects by sorting the polling place of candidates through intimidation, paving the way for the victory of their favorite party.
The good fortune of the Khan-aligned applicants, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or P. T. I. , has upset this strategy and pushed the country’s political scene into uncharted territory.
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