Former prime minister Imran Khan has said that it is a misconception that ex-Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief General Faiz Hameed was his favourite officer, saying that the matter of appointing the next army chief had never crossed his mind.
The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairperson said this during an interview with television host Aftab Iqbal on Saturday June 18.
Responding to a question by the host about whether it matters who the army chief was, Khan said, “Believe me, the question of who gets to be army chief has never crossed my mind,” adding that interference in who gets appointed where is something that is done by people who want control over institutions.
Imran said that the idea that General Faiz Hameed was partial to him was ‘factually incorrect’, asserting that the only reason the two were in contact was because the ISI chief is supposed to be have a direct relationship with the prime minister.
“I don’t know any other army officials, because I don’t ever interact with them,” he said, adding that he even asked Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa to recommend someone because ‘it’s his army and he knows them better’.
He claimed that people like Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) supremo and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif are the ones who worry about appointing someone who will be loyal to them, because they have done ‘corruption’, and they constantly ‘fear losing their money’, so they need an army chief who will ‘stand by them throughout’.
“In fact, they want the army to turn into the Punjab police,” said Imran.
“I never interfered in the judiciary, never used the police for revenge proceedings, never messed with the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), nor did I ever launch a false case against someone using the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), apart from the valid corruption cases.”
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