• Suleman Shahbaz reaches Pakistan. 
• He landed in Islamabad in Sunday’s wee hours. 
• Later, he left for Lahore aboard a private plane.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s son, Suleman Shehbaz has landed in Pakistan after spending over four years in the United Kingdom, Geo News reported. 

Suleman flew to Islamabad from Saudi Arabia via foreign airline’s flight SV726 in Sunday’s early hours. Later, he took another flight to reach Lahore.

Earlier, PM Shehbaz’s son performed Umrah with his wife and children. Suleman has got protective bail from the Islamabad High Court until December 13. 

The Islamabad High Court (IHC) on December 8 ordered him to surrender before it on December 13 and barred authorities from arresting him till then.

Suleman had reached London from Pakistan ahead of the 2018 general elections when the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) registered several cases against him.

He was also named in several cases along with his father, the current prime minister, his brother Hamza Shahbaz, and other Sharif family members.

The Assets Recovery Unit (ARU), headed by Imran Khan’s former accountability aide Shahzad Akbar, had Suleman investigated in London in Shahbaz’s money-laundering and misuse of public office case by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) but he was given a clean chit after two years of investigation by the UK’s top anti-corruption sleuths.

Suleman claimed he was forced to leave Pakistan after fake and manipulated cases were against him and his family in order to facilitate a new political order.

He said that nobody goes into exile, leaving their homeland behind, out of their free will and it’s only under unfair circumstances that he was left with no choice but to “leave Pakistan for safety.”

“There was no chance of any justice at that time when a whole system was put in place to bring in the hybrid system, displacing us as a family and as a political party. The whole system was based on injustice and this system relied on lies, manipulations and victimisation. The whole system was geared to target us using fake cases and using the state machinery.”

He said in a statement from Madinah: “These cases were the worst example of political witch-hunt and political victimisation. There was no truth and not a scintilla of evidence of corruption in the cases cooked up by the National Accountability Bureau under the former NAB chairman Javed Iqbal and the Assets Recovery Unit.”