Pakistan’s jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan has called for new protests after he was indicted on charges of inciting attacks on the military, his party said on Friday, following a deadly protest march last week.
Khan, who has been in jail on multiple charges for more than a year, has urged followers to gather on December 13 in the northwestern city of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province ruled by his side.
The latest call comes a week after thousands of Khan’s supporters rallied in the capital Islamabad for four days, with his party saying 12 protesters had been killed by security forces.
An anti-terrorism court indicted Khan and several loyalists on Thursday on charges of targeting the military in May 2023. They pleaded not guilty.
“The new protest is for violence against our supporters,” Khan’s spokesman Mohamed Ali Saif told dpa.
The government denied that any demonstrators were killed during the march. At least six members of the security forces were reported killed in clashes with angry protesters.
Khan demanded that all his supporters arrested at the previous protests be released and that a judicial commission investigate the violence at his rally last week.
“Otherwise, we will start a civil disobedience movement from next week,” Saif said, quoting his jailed leader.
Pakistan, a nuclear-armed Islamic republic, has been in political chaos since Khan’s government was ousted in a parliamentary vote of confidence in April 2022.
