Fresh reports reaching the desk of Africa Today News, New York has revealed that the former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan is currently in a much more stable condition after he had been being shot in the leg at a political rally which had been held on Thursday in what the country’s president deemed “a heinous assassination attempt”.
It had also been reported that the former international cricket star and politician has been leading a chaotic convoy of thousands of people since Friday from the city of Lahore towards the capital, Islamabad, while he had been campaigning for fresh elections after being ousted from office in April.
“This was an attempt to kill him, to assassinate him,” senior aide, Raoof Hasan, told AFP.
Khan had been reportedly wounded when shots had been fired at him and other officials standing on the top of a modified container truck as it slowly drove through a thick crowd near Gujranwala.
“There was a guy who was in front of the container who had this automatic pistol. He fired a burst. Everyone who was standing in the very front row got hit,” former information minister Fawad Chaudhry, who was standing behind Khan, told AFP.
He said supporters in the crowd tried to snatch the gun from the attacker.
“In that scuffle, he missed the target. There was so much blood on the container.”
Six people on the container were hit and one supporter was killed, he said and there was no immediate comment from the police.
Officials from Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf said Khan was being treated at a hospital in Lahore and was in stable condition.
Video published on social media shows Khan being in the hospital with a bandage around his right calf.
In a tweet, Pakistan’s President Arif Alvi called it “a heinous assassination attempt”.
“I thank Allah that he is safe but injured with few bullets in his leg & hopefully non-critical,” he said.’
Pakistan has been grappling with Islamist militants for decades, and politicians are frequently targeted by assassination attempts and the attack on Khan had echoes of the 2007 assassination of another former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, who died when a huge bomb detonated near her vehicle as she greeted supporters in Rawalpindi while standing up through the roof hatch.