Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Friday said he was hit by four bullets on 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 in Lahore — his first since the assassination attempt — Khan said 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 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.
He said the failed assassination attempt against him will push the people of Pakistan to take to the streets like in Sri Lanka. “Either we will have a peaceful revolution or a bloody one,” “People will take to the streets like Sri Lanka. There will be chaos.”
A senior leader from Imran’s party on Friday said the assassination attempt was “a prelude to a well-thought-out conspiracy” and alleged that three officials from Pakistan’s federal government and the military establishment were the “masterminds” of the attack.
Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah said the attack was a manifestation of religious extremism in the country and asserted that his party considered the ex-premier as a “political rival and not an enemy”.
Imran Khan’s party has announced that it will hold countrywide protests after Friday prayers to press for snap elections, a demand of Imran himself.
Meanwhile, police in Pakistan’s Punjab province arrested two more suspects, who they believe sold the pistol and bullets for PKR 20,000 to Naveed Mohammad Basheer, the assailant who tried to assassinate Imran, according to a media report on Friday.