Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Fawad Chaudhry has accused what he calls the “PML-N’s Maryam Nawaz group” of having set up teams to produce fake video and audio clips, with the goal of putting members of the judiciary and other senior officials under pressure.
According to Chaudhry, the judiciary would “reject” such pressure. He claimed that Maryam Nawaz had been responsible for “fake” clips in the past which targeted not just officials but also people in her own party. “I can’t think of anything similar to what the PML-N’s Maryam Nawaz group is doing,” claimed Chaudhry.
The minister was addressing the issue of the recently leaked audio clip which was claimed by media outlet FactFocus as being a recorded conversation between former chief justice of Pakistan Saqib Nisar and an unidentified individual. FactFocus claims that the voice is that of Saqib Nisar and that he is speaking about pressure from “institutions” to deliver a certain outcome in cases against ex-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his daughter Maryam Nawaz. In this purported clip, the voice purported to be that of Nisar states that he had been told to ensure that Imran Khan is brought to power by removing the PML-N leader from power.
Fact Focus insists that it verified the clip via a US firm that specialises in multimedia forensic analysis. Meanwhile, Samaa TV claims to have conducted its own investigation, and states that the clip was piece together from old speeches of the ex-CJ. According to Samaa TV,
“Some phrases in the audio clip are exact matches with parts of speeches the former CJP did on the two occasions.”
For its part, FactFocus says that the clip was “a genuine audio tape of a conversation between two persons.”
Commenting on the forensic examination of the clip that it carried out through the US firm, FactFocus clarified:
“The forensic was about the tape, not who the two persons were. Although, the first voice is that of Mr Nisar, we don’t know the second person.”
