Pakistan

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — Former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will seek a fourth term in office, his party said Wednesday, noting he would be its consensus candidate in the upcoming parliamentary elections and the office of the prime minister.

Sharif, who has served as prime minister three times, returned to Pakistan in October after four years of self-exile in London to avoid serving prison sentences on corruption charges.

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistani police Monday freed 290 Baloch activists who were arrested when they attempted to hold a protest last week in the capital, Islamabad.

Their release came days after protest organizers gave authorities a deadline to release all those detained.

The activists had traveled 1,600 kilometers (about 1,000 miles) on Thursday from Turbat, a town in Baluchistan province, to protest forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in the militancy-ravaged southwest.

ISLAMABAD, Dec 22 (Reuters) - Pakistan's Supreme Court on Friday granted former Prime Minister Imran Khan bail in a case related to a leak of state secrets, but it was not clear how he could be released while serving a three-year sentence for corruption and facing other charges.

The 71-year-old former cricket star has been embroiled in a tangle of political and legal battles since he was ousted as prime minister in April 2022. He has not been seen in public since he was jailed for three years in August for unlawfully selling state gifts while in office from 2018 to 2022.

ISLAMABAD, Dec 18 (Reuters) - Pakistan's jailed former prime minister, Imran Khan, whose party isn't allowed to hold public rallies, used an audio clip generated by artificial intelligence (AI) late Sunday to address a virtual rally in the first event of its kind in the country.

ISLAMABAD, Dec. 17 (Xinhua) -- The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has proved to be a corridor of opportunities for Pakistan, advancing the goals of economic development, regional connectivity, and shared prosperity, said Pakistani experts during a seminar.

CPEC has served to promote bilateral relations between China and Pakistan, regional integration, and overall development, said the experts and academics at the recently held seminar organized by the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI), an Islamabad-based think tank.

ISLAMABAD, Dec 15 (Reuters) - A Pakistan court has banned media from reporting on proceedings in a closed-door trial of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan on charges of leaking state secrets, raising concerns about transparency ahead of national elections in February.

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Taliban officials are sending Afghan women to prison to protect them from gender-based violence, according to a U.N. report published Thursday.

Before the Taliban seized power in 2021, there were 23 state-sponsored women protection centers in Afghanistan where survivors of gender-based violence could seek refuge. Now there are none, the U.N. report said.

Officials from the Taliban-led administration told the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan that there was no need for such shelters or that they were a Western concept.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — A suicide bomber detonated his explosive-laden vehicle at a police station’s main gate in northwest Pakistan early Tuesday, killing at least 22 officers and wounding 32 others, and causing a part of the building to collapse upon impact, officials said, in one of the deadliest attacks in recent months.

Some militants also opened fire and a shootout ensued for hours between them and security forces before three attackers were gunned down, local police officer Kamal Khan said.

ISLAMABAD, Dec. 9 (Xinhua) -- The Oil & Gas Development Company Limited (OGDCL) of Pakistan has announced that it has discovered gas and condensate reserves in the country's southern Sindh province.

In a letter to the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX), the leading state-owned company of Pakistan said on Friday that the discovery was made at the West Well No. 2 in the Tando Allahyar district of the province.

KARACHI, Dec 08 (APP): Caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar on Friday said that the investors had regained confidence after the successful signing of a standby agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the execution of the annual budget 2023-24 and improvement in the fiscal and external accounts.