Ousted PM Imran Khan’s party threatens to resign from Pakistani parliament

The PTI party of former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan said on Sunday its lawmakers would resign from parliament after the election of a new prime minister.

"We will start the process of resignations from the National Assembly [on Monday]," former information minister Fawad Chaudhry told reporters.

Chaudhry said that his party had fielded Shah Mahmood Qureshi to vie against opposition candidate Shehbaz Sharif for the prime minister's job. He said the PTI had also raised objections over Sharif's nomination papers for the election of a new premier.

He said that the PTI's lawmakers would resign if their objections against Sharif were not sustained and his nomination was not rejected on the basis of the corruption cases he was facing.

Sharif, the president of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), is the younger brother of former three-time premier Nawaz Sharif.

He seems all set to replace Khan on Monday.

In the early hours of Sunday, Khan was voted out of office after weeks of tense political wrangling.

Khan had blamed the United States for trying to change the regime because he chose to visit Moscow on the day the Russian troops started their invasion of neighbouring Ukraine.

"Pakistan became an independent state in 1947; but the freedom struggle begins again today against a foreign conspiracy of regime change. It is always the people of the country who defend their sovereignty & democracy," Khan said in a tweet on Sunday.

In Washington, both the State Department and the White House had denied the US was attempting regime change in Pakistan.