An accountability court in Lahore on Tuesday refused to extend the physical remand for PML-N President Shehbaz Sharif and sent him to prison for a 14-day period, as it rejected the NAB plea to grant more time for interrogating him in the money laundering reference, reported 24NewsHD TV channel.
The court opted for judicial remand as the defence argued that the investigators had nothing new to say or probe as everything had been provided to the anti-graft body.
Shehbaz informed the court that he had spent 22 days in the NAB torture cell and the officials interviewed him for only 15 minutes since the last hearing despite his repeated assertions that he should be asked something new.
He said they had already submitted the required documents and the NAB was repeating the same old questions.
Amjad Pervaiz – the defence counsel – grilled the prosecutor and told the court that the NAB had previously summoned his client in the Saaf Pani case but arrested him for the Ashiana Housing Scheme.
It is worth noting that the NAB has decided to close the much-hyped inquiry into the Saaf Pani project after it was unable to find any wrongdoing or proof against the PML-N president.
When the NAB prosecutor insisted on physical remand and claimed that the accused was not cooperating, the accountability court judge asked him what they wanted to probe when the reference had already been filed.
The NAB had arrested Shehbaz on September 28 after a two-member Lahore High Court (LHC) bench comprising Justice Sardar Ahmed Naeem and Justice Farooq Haider rejected his interim bail in assets beyond means and money laundering case.
Later, they managed to get a 14-day physical remand on the very next day which was extended by seven days last week.
In a brief media chat, Shehbaz described as fascism the incident in which policemen barged into the hotel room where Maryam Nawaz and Capt Safdar were staying and took the son-in-law of Nawaz Sharif, the PML-N supremo, into custody.
“The attitude of Imran Khan is of a fascist,” he said and added Imran had been busy in targeting the opposition at a time when the people were being crushed by inflation.