PTI ex-MPA Shaukat Yousafzai offloaded from Saudi Arabia-bound flight at Peshawar airport

Former PTI MPA Shaukat Ali Yousafzai was offloaded from a flight heading to Saudi Arabia at Peshawar’s Bacha Khan International Airport on Wednesday morning.

Speaking to Dawn.com, the former Khyber Pakhtunkhwa information minister said he was detained for more than two hours at the airport and released by the officials only after the plane had departed.

The incident comes a day after his brother Liaqat Ali Yousafzai, who is the PTI’s Shangla chapter president, was taken into custody by the local police along with six other party workers for the alleged violation of Section 144.

In July, Shaukat had been arrested along with other PTI leaders by the Shangla police under section 3 of the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance. However, he was acquitted two months ago.

Today, Yousafzai’s flight was scheduled to depart at 9:15am via Emirates flight EK-637 for Saudi Arabia, where he was to perform Umrah. He stated that after the boarding process was completed, the airport’s security officials came and took him into their custody “without any reason”.

The PTI ex-MPA added that when he asked the officials why he was being prevented from boarding the plane, they only replied they had “orders from authorities to not let you fly abroad”.

Yousafzai went on to say that he would approach the Peshawar High Court and file a case against the airport’s security officials for offloading him as, according to him, neither was there a first information report against him nor was his name on the Exit Control List.

Advocate Jawad Ali Noor, general secretary of the Insaf Lawyers Forum’s Malakand division, also confirmed the development to Dawn.com and said Yousafzai was scheduled to return to the country on Nov 30.

He further said that the airport staff did not inform Yousafzai whether there was any FIR filed against him. The ILF lawyer added that the former MPA was released at around 11:50am, more than two hours after the plane had departed.

Yousafzai was the MPA-elect in the 2018 general elections from the PK-23 constituency and was made the provincial information minister later that year. He is currently serving as the PTI’s provincial senior vice president.