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Pakistani police and supporters of Imran Khan Fierce battles were fought outside the former prime minister’s home in the eastern city of Lahore on Tuesday, injuring several on both sides, ahead of his eventual arrest, a government spokesman and witnesses said.
The police charged the supporters with batons and tear gas shells.
Several hundred of Khan’s supporters gathered outside his house after a police team arrived from Islamabad to arrest him on a court order, government spokesman Amir Mir told Reuters.
Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) workers started the violence, injuring several police officers, Mir said, adding, “If Imran Khan ensures his presence in the court, that will be fine, otherwise the law it will run its course. “
Khan urged his supporters to stand for the rule of law and fight for true independence.
“The police came to arrest me and send me to jail,” he said in a videotaped statement posted on his Twitter handle. “If anything happens to me, either they send me to jail or they kill me, you have to prove that this nation will continue to fight even without Imran Khan.”
Mir said the government has called in paramilitary forces to control the situation.
Several supporters of Khan were injured when police resorted to tear gas, witnesses said.
There were similar clashes last week.
“We have come here only to comply with the court order,” Deputy Inspector General of Police Syed Shahzad Nadeem told reporters.
The workers started pelting the police with stones and bricks, and in response the police fired water cannons at them and in some cases beat them with batons, he said.
Live television footage showed supporters also using gunshots and attacking police with bricks and sticks.
“Our understanding is that the police cannot arrest Imrabn Khan as he has secured protective bail from the high court,” his aide Shah Mehmood Qureshi told reporters.
An Islamabad court issued an arrest warrant in the case against Khan on charges that he had threatened a judge in one of his speeches last year.
The former prime minister has been embroiled in several court cases since his ouster early last year in a vote of confidence in parliament.
He called for snap elections in protest rallies across the country, a move his successor Shehbaz Sharif rejected, saying the election would go ahead as scheduled later this year.
Khan was also shot and wounded at one of these rallies.
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