On Monday, June 19, the leader of Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) and member of Pakistan’s National Assembly, Ali Wazir, was taken into custody by security agencies at the Dumdel check post in North Waziristan while he was traveling towards Razmal from Miranshah. Reports said he was presented in court on Tuesday and remanded to Bannu prison.
Speaking in the National Assembly, PTM leader Mohsin Dawar said that he had been arrested in the Waziristan region although a case had been filed against him in Peshawar.
Reports suggest that the FIA Cyber Crime Circle Peshawar has started an inquiry against Wazir and another PTM leader, Manzoor Pashteen, for allegedly using defamatory language against state institutions. The agency had summoned the two leaders to appear in its Peshawar office before June 23.
Ali Wazir had recently spent 26 months in prison in different sedition cases. He was arrested in December 2020 and released in February 2023. A resident of Wana in South Waziristan, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, Ali Wazir is the only Marxist to be part of the National Assembly of Pakistan.
Wazir has been a staunch critic of the Pakistani establishment for its mistreatment of the Pashtun community. He, along with Manzoor Pashteen, has been a key voice of the PTM, which has been demanding justice and accountability for crimes against Pashtuns living in the tribal areas of Pakistan since 2014.
PTM has been advocating for an end to the war crimes, extrajudicial killings, torture, and harassment of innocent Pashtuns under the pretext of counter-terrorism operations in the region that borders Afghanistan.
