Nawaz Sharif-Osama bin Laden money deal: Has Imran Khan `proved` that Pakistan PM promotes jihad in Kashmir?

The party of Pakistan's opposition leader Imran Khan has been calling for Nawaz Sharif's resignation for alleged corruption.

Islamabad: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has said it would sue Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for allegedly taking money from slain al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden to promote jihad in Kashmir during the 1990s.

Notably, the party of Pakistan's opposition leader Imran Khan has been calling for Sharif's resignation for alleged corruption.

Dawn online quoted PTI spokesperson Fawad Chaudhry as saying on Monday that his party had completed the process of internal discussions and decided after reviewing all legal aspects of the case to file the petition against Sharif and his party Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) for "conspiring against democracy in the country after receiving money from foreign forces".

Last week, the PTI had announced that it had decided to file a petition in the Supreme Court.

The PTI does not possess substantial evidence to fortify its case except for some interviews and excerpts from a book 'Khalid Khawaja: Shaheed-e-Aman' by Shamama Khalid, the wife of a former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy Khalid Khawaja, who was brutally murdered in 2010 by Pakistani Taliban.

The book claims that Sharif's pledge of introducing an Islamic system had attracted bin Laden.

"Relying on the revelations made in certain interviews and a book, PTI intends to open up a shady chapter in the country's political history from late 1980s in an apparent bid to further malign Sharif," a report in The Express Tribune said.

The interviews and the book claim that Sharif took money, amounting to Rs 1.5 billion from bin Laden to promote jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, the report added.

They also claim that later, an amount of Rs 270 million from this money was utilised to support a no-confidence move against Bhutto in 1989, the report said.

However, in 2013, PTI leader Masood Sharif Khan Khattak, who is a former director-general of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), had submitted a statement before the Supreme Court in a case related to misappropriation of the IB funds in 1989.

In his nine-page statement, Khattak had claimed that the moving force behind the vote of no-confidence against Bhutto in 1989 was not political and named former president Ghulam Ishaq Khan and former Army chief Mirza Aslam Baig, claiming that they wanted to keep Bhutto out of power, the report said.

Chaudhry, meanwhile, said, "In the past, Sharif remained an active part of several conspiracies against the elected governments".

Last week, the PTI announced to open up another legal front against Sharif, saying it would file a petition demanding implementation on a 2012 verdict of the apex court in the Asghar Khan case which determined that Sharif and other politicians had received money from an intelligence agency prior to the 1990 General Election to form an alliance against the Pakistan Peoples Party.

He said the two cases would be filed this week.

(With Agency inputs)