MNA Mohsin Dawar says stopped at Quetta airport, barred from entering city

 Lawmaker Mohsin Dawar said he was barred from leaving Quetta airport on Friday by authorities upon arrival in Balochistan's capital.

"I have just landed in Quetta and I have been stopped from leaving the airport by security agencies," said Dawar via a tweet. "I have been told that my entry to Balochistan has been barred again for 90 days. The state thinks it can break our resolve with such petty tactics. They can’t."

He also posted a notice on his Twitter account, which said that the entry of Dawar and fellow lawmaker Ali Wazir in Balochistan was banned for 90 days under the Balochistan Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance, 1960.

The notice, dated July 29, said that the ban on Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) leaders had been imposed "in the best interest of public peace and safety".

Speaking to DawnNewsTV, Dawar said he was speaking to government officials and added that he was being accompanied by workers and supporters of the group.

“The officials informed Mohsin that the deputy commissioner was in Islamabad. The additional deputy commissioner has reached the airport to talk with Mohsin,” Khalil Ahmed, a PTM worker present at the airport said. Khalil further said that the MNA had come to Balochistan to offer condolences to families whose members had been killed in a firing incident at Chaman border.

Dawar and his supporters had flown in from Islamabad. According to an official at the airport, the last flight from Quetta to Islamabad took off earlier in the day and no other flights are scheduled to other cities today.

Members of the group's Quetta chapter gathered outside the airport as news of the development reached them and threatened to stage a protest against the government over the move.

In November 2018, Dawar and Wazir were offloaded from a flight bound from Peshawar to Dubai by officials of security agencies and were told that they could not travel abroad because their names were on the Exit Control List.

In December of the same year, the federal cabinet directed the interior ministry to scrap the PTM leaders' names off the list.

Earlier this year in March, Dawar and Wazir were stopped from boarding a Kabul-bound flight, as officials said that their names were on no fly list. They were going to Afghanistan to attend President Ashraf Ghani's oath-taking ceremony.

At the time, Firdous Ashiq Awan, the then special assistant to the prime minister on information and broadcasting, had said that the names of both MNAs were on the ECL and they "did not ask for permission to go to Afghanistan".

https://www.dawn.com/news/1577902