Cricket star candidate badly hurt in campaign fall

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Imran Khan, the Pakistani sports star who has emerged as a rising force in the country’s politics, was seriously injured when he tumbled from a mechanical lift at an election rally Tuesday.

Khan, 60, was rushed to the hospital, where he was treated for head wounds and back injuries, doctors said, effectively putting an end to his campaigning just days before the general elections on Saturday.

The fall, which was captured on live television, offered a dramatic finale to a closely fought election campaign that has been marred by Taliban attacks on secular parties. Bombs killed 16 people at two election events in the northwest on Tuesday.

Khan’s main electoral rival, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, canceled his rallies scheduled for Wednesday, the last day of campaigning, in solidarity with Khan.

Video footage from a rally in Lahore showed Khan falling about 15 feet to the ground, head first, after supporters standing alongside him apparently overbalanced as a forklift hoisted them onto the stage.

Supporters took Khan, who was bloodied and unconscious, to the hospital, where he received stitches for his head wounds. Doctors said he had also suffered two small fractures to his backbone.

As a former cricket captain who led Pakistan to a World Cup victory in 1992, and a man whose rugged looks earned him sex-symbol status, Khan has long been a national hero. But his foray into national politics has been a roller-coaster ride: He burst onto the scene with a series of anticorruption rallies in 2011, then fell out of favor with many supporters, only to rise again in this campaign.

In recent weeks, his nonstop campaigning, in which he has vowed to sweep out corruption and old-style patronage politics, has electrified the public. He has emerged as a potent competitor to Sharif, who is a favorite to emerge as the next prime minister, with both men battling for votes in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province.

His trenchant criticism of U.S. drone strikes in the tribal belt and his fiery rhetoric against corruption have won him support among young, urban Pakistanis.

But the vagaries of Pakistan’s electoral system, and the entrenched power of traditional politicians, make it hard to predict how much of that popularity will convert into seats in Parliament.