ISLAMABAD: The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has disqualified senior PTI leader Shah Mehmood Qureshi from contesting elections for five years, effectively throwing him out of electoral race days before the Feb 8 polls.

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       A notification issued a day earlier and shared with the media on Saturday stated the decision has been taken after Mr Qureshi’s conviction by a special court in the cipher case.

       The PPP leader was in the run for NA-214, Tharparkar, Sindh. The nomination papers of Mr Qureshi and his son Zain Qureshi had been rejected by the returning officer, but allowed to contest by the Sindh High Court’s appellate tribunal last month.

       Mr Qureshi was also a candidate from NA-150 and NA-151 (Multan), besides two provincial assembly seats, but his papers were rejected by the returning officers and appeals by an appellate tribunal of the Lahore High Court (Multan Bench).

       A senior official of the ECP, when contacted, said Mr Qureshi’s disqualification will not affect the electoral process in Tharparkar’s NA-214.

       He said that under the law, elections are postponed after the death of a contesting candidate, but there was no such room in case of disqualification. He refused to offer any comment when it was pointed out that the ECP had postponed the election in a constituency in Rawalpindi following the conviction and subsequent disqualification of PML-N leader Hanif Abbasi in ephedrine case in 2018, and allowed the party to field some other candidate in his place.

       Published in Dawn, February 4th, 2024