پنجابی میں کہتے ، ہن آرام اے pic.twitter.com/U9wcmIaRXm
— Abdul Qayyum Siddiqui (@QayyumReports) September 28, 2022
Less than a week after three audio clips of meetings between Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and various political figures were leaked to the public, a new audio clip—this time allegedly of a conversation between then-P.M. Imran Khan and his principal secretary Azam Khan—emerged on Wednesday, raising questions over the alleged ‘foreign conspiracy’ narrative employed by the PTI since Khan’s ouster through a vote of no-confidence.
In the audio clip, a voice that appears to be of Khan can be heard saying: “We only have to play on this. We don’t have to name [a country]. We only have to play with this, that this date [of no-trust motion] was [decided] before.” When he proceeds to talk about the letter he had used as “proof” of his foreign conspiracy allegations, a second voice—believed to be that of Azam—says it would be wise to bring the matter on record through a meeting.
“See, if you recall, in that [letter] the ambassador has written in the end to [send] a demarche. Even if the demarche is not to be sent, as I have thought a lot about overnight—you said they raised it—I thought about how to cover all this. Let’s hold a meeting with [then-foreign minister] Shah Mahmood Qureshi and the foreign secretary. Shah Mahmood Qureshi will read out that letter and whatever he reads out will be converted into a copy. I will then make minutes that the foreign secretary has prepared this [letter],” he says.
“But its [cipher’s] analysis will have to be conducted here. We will carry out the analysis and convert it into minutes as we want so that it becomes the official record,” he continues, adding that this “analysis” would conclude that a threat had been issued to Pakistan. “It is called a threat in diplomatic language,” he said, adding “minutes are in my hands … we will draft the minutes.”
The first voice—believed to be Khan—then asks who should be included in the meeting. “Shah Mahmood, you, me and [foreign secretary] Sohail?” he asks, to which the other person replies in the affirmative. “We will do it tomorrow,” Khan then says.
“When he [Qureshi] will read it out, I will easily copy it and it will be on record that this has happened,” said Azam, urging the man believed to be Khan to call the foreign secretary “so that it doesn’t remain political and becomes a part of the bureaucratic record.”
To this, Khan asks if the ambassador had written the cipher personally. “If we did not get a copy, then how did they take this out?” questions Azam. “This was raised from here. But anyhow, its a foreign conspiracy,” Khan responds.
PTI responds
Various leaders of the PTI, reacting to the latest leak, claimed it “proved” that the cipher had been hidden from Khan. In a posting on Twitter, Hammad Azhar—who served as energy minister in the PTI government—alleged Khan’s government had been removed following the “exact same script” as was given in the cipher. “I think the cipher should be released now and the people of Pakistan should decide whether it was a conspiracy or even more than that,” he added. Curiously, no PTI leader has sought to reject the contents of the audio leak as manipulated or falsified, suggesting it is a genuine recording.
A day earlier, addressing a press conference, P.M. Sharif had questioned what was even left to investigate about the cipher. Noting that two separate meetings of the National Security Committee and the Supreme Court had all found no evidence of any conspiracy, he said there was no need to keep digging into it.