Peshawar: Pakistan's cricketer-turned politician and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party chief Imran Khan's bid to show solidarity with family members of children killed in the Peshawar army school shoot out turned out to be damp quib. He and his wife were heckled and booed and greeted with cries of “Go Imran Go” from parents of the victims. At least 132 children and several teachers were killed when Taliban gunmen opened fire at the school.
Family members of the dead, holding banners and placards, tried to blockade his convoy and denounced him for “forgetting the ordeal of the martyred families” by opting to marry Reham Khan, the TV presenter, at a lavish ceremony on January 8, three weeks after the country’s worst terrorist attack.
Some parents also criticised Khan, 62, for not visiting the school earlier and only eventually doing so “with reporters to show his fake prayers and condolences.” One mother said: “For one whole day, the media showed Imran Khan’s wedding and valima (wedding banquet.) They were not showing anything about the children anymore. Nobody cares and he came to visit after a month.”
Khan’s PTI party controls the government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, of which Peshawar is the capital.
The badly damaged school, in Peshawar’s sprawling military zone, is attended mainly by the children of Pakistani soldiers. It reopened for a week of counselling for staff and pupils before the resumption of regular teaching.
Khan’s British bride faces fury
Khan’s new wife, a former BBC presenter, was facing fresh criticism from religious conservatives in Pakistan after a film emerged of her cooking and selling pork sausages at an English country fair.
Footage of Reham Khan, 41, a British Pakistani who worked as a television weather presenter for the regional news programme South Today, was recorded at the South of England Show in 2011.
The film has been viewed widely on the internet in Pakistan in recent days, along with other footage of her wearing revealing outfits.
During the sequence filmed at the fair at Ardingly, West Sussex, Reham was tutored in the arts of cooking and selling pork sausages by David Bell, twice Britain’s national sausage making champion and owner of Bangers Galore, a manufacturer based in nearby Horsham. Bell, who appears in the video alongside Reham manning his sausage stall, said that the controversy was ridiculous. “She didn’t actually eat any of the sausages,” he said.
