Former president and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) co-chairperson Asif Ali Zardari was shifted to a private hospital in Karachi Sunday evening after he fell ill, the party said.
“Former President of Pakistan and PPPP Asif Ali Zardari was shifted to hospital after feeling unwell late Sunday evening. Doctors are conducting his medical check-up and necessary medical tests,” the party spokesperson said in a brief tweet.
Sources within the party said it was PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari who took his father to the hospital.
Zardari has been admitted on doctors’ advice, the sources said, adding that after results of initial tests are received, the course of treatment will be prescribed.
An accountability court in Islamabad last month indicted the former president, his sister Faryal Talpur and other accused in the mega-money laundering reference pertaining to the fake accounts case.
Zardari is facing multiple corruption cases that have stemmed from a mega money laundering scandal, which came into the limelight in 2018.
The former president, Faryal and several of their business associates are being probed as part of a 2015 case regarding fake accounts and fictitious transactions — which were initially found to have totalled Rs35 billion — conducted through 29 ‘benami’ accounts.
During a hearing of the bail petition filed by Zardari, his legal counsel Advocate Farooq H. Naek told the court that the former president “is a chronic patient suffering from multiple ailments. He is a heart patient having three stents in his heart. He has a Holter Monitor attached to his chest so that the doctors are able to check and note variations in his heartbeat and blockages in his arteries. The petitioner is a patient of ischemic heart disease, which means that his heart may have inadequate supply of blood and oxygen”.
Naek had said Zardari also “suffers from various other ailments such as cervical and lumbar spondylosis, sensory and motor neuropathy with impaired proprioception”.
It is suggested that his medical treatment under such conditions would not be possible while in jail.
