Chief of the Army Staff General Asim Munir denied receiving any letter from former premier and PTI founder Imran Khan on Thursday. Talking informally to the media and apparently referring to the incarcerated former premier’s ‘open letters’, the army chief said he would not “read it [letter] even if I receive it”. The army chief maintained that he would forward any such communication to the prime minister if he received it. General Munir maintained that the country was progressing satisfactorily and Pakistan was on the path of development. \u201cPakistan is moving forward and Pakistan has to move forward,\u201d the army chief added. The development came only a day after Khan, who has been behind bars since August 2023 in dozens of cases ranging from corruption to terrorism, penned a third open letter to Gen Munir, according to his lawyer. In the third letter, the jailed PTI founder reiterated election rigging allegations, saying \u201cmoney launderers” were brought into power via manipulated polls. “The PTI founder, in his letter to the army chief, has raised the issue of giving preference to the minority over the majority through election fraud,” his lawyer Faisal Chaudhry had said in a statement. Earlier, the 71-year-old cricketer-turned-politician said he had penned two “open letters” to the army chief on Feb 3 and Feb 8, \u201cbecause all democratic avenues had been obstructed\u201d. In previous letters, Imran pointed out what he claimed was a growing distance between the military and the public. In his letters, the former premier penned six points and urged the army to reevaluate its policy to win over the public with reasons and suggestions proposed by Imran to remedy the situation. The letters held importance as the former ruling party ended its negotiations with the PML-N-led government last month, in which the PTI had demanded two things \u2014 the formation of judicial commissions on events that transpired on May 9, 2023, and November 24-27 as well as the release of “all political prisoners”, including Khan. In December last year, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Director General Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said that no political leader’s desire for power should be more important than Pakistan’s interests. The ISPR top spokesperson’s comments came in response to a question about purported backdoor talks between the PTI and the establishment. “All political parties and leaders are respectable to us. No individual, his politics and his desire for power are above Pakistan,” he said during a media briefing. The government, on the other hand, earlier reacted strongly to Imran’s move to write letters to the army chief, with PM’s Adviser on Public and Political Affairs Rana Sanaullah saying that they intend to create divisions between the military and the public or sow misunderstandings within the army\u2019s command. Sanaullah questioned the origin of Khan\u2019s letters from jail, asking: \u201cWhere are these letters coming from? If he wants to engage in political struggle, he should do so in the parliament.\u201d Meanwhile, PML-N Senator Irfan Siddiqui had said that Khan’s letter to Gen Asim Munir was proof of the former’s “despair and frustration”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chief of the Army Staff General Asim Munir denied receiving any letter from former premier and PTI founder Imran Khan on Thursday. Talking informally to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22877,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news-updates"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}