Lahore: Former Pakistani minister Shireen Mazari has said that Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri would still be alive if Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan was in power. Masari alleged that the US had started trying to oust Imran Khan from power even before the Taliban came to power, and that the US had been planning to kill Ansari for months. Masari, who is also a close follower of Imran Khan, made the allegation on Twitter.
Masari wrote on Twitter that the U.S. had engineered the ex-prime minister’s 18th coup d’état to remove him from office because they wanted a supportive government to help them assassinate Zawahiri. He also doubted whether the Hellfire missile that targeted the Al Qaeda chief in Kabul had flown through Pakistani airspace.
‘Amazing question: A US drone flew into Afghanistan from the direction of the Gulf region – assuming Pakistan has not yet provided assistance (the government may have done so covertly) – but through which country’s airspace did the drone fly? Iran does not provide any airspace to the U.A., so they are likely to use Pakistani airspace,” Masari tweeted.
The former minister points out that the United States started plans to topple Imran Khan 2 months before the Taliban came back to power in neighboring Afghanistan. Masari said that efforts to topple the Imran Khan government had already started in June 2021. This was part of a massive conspiracy against Imran. Calling Khan ‘Taliban Khan’, known for his close ties to Taliban leaders, should be read in conjunction with this context.
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He says the ‘foreign conspiracy’ theories he mentioned earlier have been fueled by accusations by current government sources that the protests against the Imran Khan government are illegal and undermining the new regime. Imran Khan himself had expressed suspicion that there was a conspiracy against him. Khan has publicly claimed that Assistant Secretary Donald Lu of the US Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs met Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington in March and told him that Khan should be removed from office in a vote of no confidence.
Meanwhile, the US strongly denied the allegations leveled by Imran. The US has issued a public statement that it has no involvement in the conflict in Pakistan. The US asked what they did wrong when the army of youth took to the streets against the Imran government to protest the financial crisis.
Weeks later, Khan lost a no-confidence vote on 10 April. As a result, he was removed from the post of Prime Minister. Opposition parties nominated Shehbaz Sharif, who was elected Prime Minister of Pakistan a day after a no-confidence vote.
However, Imran is still pushing anti-American conspiracy theories in his bid to return to power. Imran claimed that there was US involvement in his ouster from the post of Prime Minister and that the current government led by Sharif was slaves of America.