Islamabad: Attorney General (AG) of Pakistan in a letter has asked the Punjab government to place the fresh medical report about the health of former Prime Minister and leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) Nawaz Sharif before a special medical board for the purpose of evaluation.
Accordingly, the Punjab government has constituted a 9-member board appointing senior physician Dr Arif Nadeem as its head. This is the same board that has been evaluating Nawaz Sharif’s health reports previously. The board is to submit its recommendations/evaluation of Nawaz Sharif’s health in five days.
Nawaz Sharif’s US-based doctor, Fayaz Shawl, on January 28, submitted a medical report to the Lahore High Court (LHC) related to Nawaz Sharif’s health condition.
In the three-page medical report, Nawaz Sharif is advised against undertaking any travel “without undergoing a definitive treatment in London.”
“If he [Sharif] returns to solitary confinement, he may develop what we call the takotsubo syndrome due to a stressful environment” and it could have “devastating consequences”, Dr Shawl has warned in the report.
The AG office has requested the Home Secretary to make sure that the new report should be provided to the medical board formed by the Punjab government so that the board could give its expert opinion on Nawaz Sharif’s health.
The letter further states that the medical board formed previously to examine the PML-N leader’s health condition had asked for more medical reports to submit its assessment report on his health condition.
Once the medical board submits its recommendations on Nawaz Sharif’s health condition, the AG office will devise the next course of action against Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly and younger brother of Nawaz Sharif, Shahbaz Sharif who had submitted an affidavit in LHC as Nawaz’s guarantor.
As per the AG office, Shahbaz Sharif is the guarantor of his elder brother Nawaz Sharif’s repatriation to the LHC within four weeks, and the federal cabinet has also directed the AG office to take legal action against Shahbaz Sharif’s fake affidavit.
The AG’s letter has come a day after Shahbaz Sharif who is also President of the PML-N, termed an earlier letter written to him by the AG’s office — seeking fresh medical reports of his elder brother — “politically-motivated” and in violation of the orders of the Lahore High Court (LHC).
“I have reasons to believe that the issuance of the letter is prompted by political motivation and considerations extraneous to law, constitution of medical board, proceedings by it and the demand raised on its basis through the letter runs counter to the mandate and is completely out of scope of the order (of the LHC) dated Nov 16, 2019,” Shahbaz had written in his reply to the AG’s office.
On November 16, 2019, a division bench of the LHC had granted one-time permission to Nawaz to travel abroad as an interim arrangement for four weeks and he was to return when certified by doctors that he has regained health and was fit to return to Pakistan.
_resources1_16a3106a819_small.jpg)
