Cameras were installed in my jail cell, bathroom: Maryam Nawaz

Islamabad - “I have gone to jail twice and if I speak about how I, a woman, was treated in jail, they will not have the audacity to show their faces,” she said

Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) vice president Maryam Nawaz Sharif on Thursday alleged that authorities had installed cameras in her jail cell and bathroom.

In a recent interview, Sharif spoke about the alleged inconveniences she had to face when she was incarcerated after being arrested in the Chaudhary Sugar Mills case last year, reported Geo News.

“I have gone to jail twice and if I speak about how I, a woman, was treated in jail, they will not have the audacity to show their faces,” she said, referring to the government.

In her criticism of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government, the PML-N vice president said that if authorities can break into a room and arrest her in front of her father Nawaz Sharif and launch personal attacks on her, then no woman is safe in Pakistan.

“A woman, whether she is in Pakistan or anywhere else, is not weak,” she said.

Geo News reported that Sharif had said that her party is open to dialogue with the military establishment within the ambit of the Constitution, provided that the incumbent PTI government is removed from power.

She further stated that she was not against state institutions but stressed that there would be no dialogue in secret. She also said the idea of dialogue through the platform of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) can be deliberated upon.

The PML-N leader was arrested last year in the money laundering case, where she had claimed that the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has arrested her by violating the law and that she was being politically victimised.

In a press conference last year, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Accountability Shahzad Akbar had said that the Sharif family had used Chaudhry Sugar Mills for money-laundering and illegal transfer of its shares.

More than Rs7 million worth of shares were transferred to Maryam Nawaz in 2008 through the mill’s shares, which were later transferred to Yousaf Abbas Sharif in 2010, Akbar said.

• Pakistan