Pak Cabinet okays legal action against Imran, aides

Pakistan's Cabinet has formally given the go-ahead to hold an inquiry into the audio leaks purportedly featuring PTI Chairman Imran Khan and his party leaders, it emerged yesterday.

On Friday, the Cabinet suggested that legal action could be taken after a steady stream of audio recordings surfaced, most recently of informal conversations allegedly between Imran and his aides — Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Asad Umar and his former principal secretary Azam Khan — purportedly discussing the cypher that the PTI chief has for long presented as evidence of a "foreign conspiracy" to oust him from office.

Dawn also rteported that the Cypher had gone "missing" from the Prime Minister House records.

The Cabinet was told that the audios exposed "the criminal conspiracy of the former government", while the cypher was given "fictitious meanings for political mileage and subsequently it was stolen after fraud, forgery, fabrication."

In the first audio clip leaked on September 28, Imran can be heard telling Azam to "play up" the cypher and turn it into a foreign plot to oust his government.

To this end, Azam is heard suggesting to Imran to call a "meeting of then-foreign minister Qureshi and foreign secretary wherein we will ask Qureshi to read out the letter. So whatever he will tell us, I will type it down and convert it into [meeting] minutes" so that it becomes part of the office record.