In a volte-face, a former senior bureaucrat who alleged that 13 candidates from Pakistan’s garrison city of Rawalpindi were forcefully declared winners in the elections, on Thursday withdrew his allegations and said he made the false charges after ex-prime minister Imran Khan’s party offered him a “lucrative position”.
“I take full responsibility for my actions and surrender myself before the authorities for any kind of legal action,” Liaquat Ali Chattha, the former Commissioner of Rawalpindi, was quoted as saying by sources.
On Saturday, Chattha resigned from his office after “accepting responsibility” for manipulation of poll results.
“I am taking responsibility for all this wrongdoing and telling you that the chief election commissioner and the chief justice are also completely involved in this,” he had said.
He had also accused Chief Justice of Pakistan Qazi Faez Isa and Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sikander Sultan Raja of facilitating the rigging of votes.
Retracting his allegations in a letter to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Thursday, Chattha said that all of this was done in coordination with jailed former prime minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, which had promised him lucrative positions.
Chattha, who has been a civil servant for 32 years, said that after the February 8 elections, he had secretly and discreetly travelled to Lahore to meet a PTI leader on February 11.
“It was in this meeting, that he made an offer to me that if I play a role in supporting the PTI’s ongoing narrative of rigging in elections and maligning state institutions, he would ensure a lucrative position for me in future.”
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