Senior election official admits to rigging Pakistan vote

Pakistan’s electoral authority has ordered an inquiry after a senior bureaucrat said he helped to manipulate the results of 13 seats in the general election held on February 8.

Liaqat Ali Chattha, commissioner of the garrison city of Rawalpindi, where the country’s military has its headquarters, said that candidates who were losing the elections “were made to win” and efforts to justify the manipulated results were continuing in “an organised manner at some offices”. There have been widespread allegations of rigging after authorities switched off the country’s mobile phone network on election day and the count took more than 24 hours.

The army-backed Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, short of a majority, has announced a partnership with the Pakistan Peoples Party and a handful of smaller parties to form the next government.

Before stepping down from his post, Mr Chattha said he supervised the rigging of votes in Rawalpindi.

“We converted the losers into winners, reversing margins of 70,000 votes in 13 national assembly seats,” he said.

“For committing such a heinous crime, I will hand myself over to the police.”

He also implicated the head of the election commission and the country’s senior judge.

The election commission rejected Mr Chattha’s allegations, but said it would “hold an inquiry”.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a leading advocacy group, said after Mr Chattha’s announcement that the “involvement of the state bureaucracy in rigging in Pakistan is beginning to be exposed”.

Candidates from the PML-N and PPP claimed most of the seats in Rawalpindi, sweeping aside candidates loyal to jailed former prime minister Imran Khan, who was ineligible to contest the election after a spate of recent convictions.

Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party was effectively barred from fielding candidates in the election, but independents backed by him together won more seats than any of the parties.