LAHORE: The Lahore High Court (LHC) dismissed a petition of former prime minister Imran Khan challenging the closure of his right to reply to objections raised by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in his defamation suit against PTI chief Imran Khan.
Meanwhile, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) has issued the order on a petition seeking Imran Khan’s disqualification as a lawmaker for “concealing his putative daughter in his nomination papers”.
A sessions court in Lahore, hearing the Rs10 billion defamation suit filed by Shehbaz Sharif, had closed Imran Khan’s right to respond or oppose after he failed to respond in time to the objections raised.
Shehaz Sharif earlier asked the court to close Imran Khan’s right to file his written statement because of “inordinate delay” on the part of the PTI chief through “unnecessary adjournments”.
IHC issues notice on petition seeking PTI chief’s disqualification as MNA ‘for concealing his daughter’
Imran Khan then appealed the lower court’s decision before the LHC. However, Justice Chaudhry Muhammad Iqbal dismissed his petition and upheld the trial court’s decision.
The defamation suit, filed in 2017, alleged that the defendant (Mr Khan) started uttering false and malicious statements against the plaintiff (Imran Sharif) that the latter offered Rs10 billion to the former through a common friend in exchange for withdrawing the Panama Papers’ case pending before the Supreme Court.
It pleaded that Imran Khan’s “baseless and defamatory statements” were widely circulated by the media, denting Shehbaz Sharif’s integrity and causing him “extreme mental torture, agony and anxiety”.
The court was requested to issue a decree for recovering Rs10 billion as compensation for the publication of defamatory content in favour of the plaintiff.
After four years, the PTI chief filed his reply to the suit in 2021, saying one of his friends told him that someone known to him and also the Sharif family approached him with an offer to pay billions of rupees if he could convince him (Imran Khan) to stop pursuing the Panama case.
Imran Khan said he had disclosed the incident in the interest of the public good and therefore it did not constitute defamation. He said he did not specifically attribute any statement to shehbaz Sharif while narrating the incident.
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