KARACHI: The morning after Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf’s (PTI) Naeemul Haque tweeted that he had not indulged in any wrongdoing by discussing marriage with his party’s former member, MNA Ayesha Gulalai, the embattled party claimed that his Twitter account had been hacked, thus introducing another twist to the controversy surrounding Ms Gulalai’s scathing allegations against Imran Khan and his party colleagues.

Screenshots of the tweets, which were deleted, were doing the rounds on the social media and showed that Mr Haque had indeed discussed marriage with Ms Gulalai.

@naeemul_haq said: “Should I apologise for discussing marriage with Ayesha Gulalai? No I don’t think so. Nothing wrong with that.”

An hour later he tweeted again: “There was no marriage proposal as such to Ayesha Gulalai as she herself said in Asma Shirazi’s show, just a discussion.”

The tweets, it is believed, came in response to Ms Gulalai’s claims in an interview to a private television channel that she had received marriage proposals from Mr Haque and the PTI chief.

Since then Mr Haque has claimed that his account had been compromised and the tweets were posted without his knowledge.

In the interview, Ms Gulalai claimed that Mr Haque had sent her a message that said: “I am very alone and wish to marry you.”

She added that “Imran Khan did not speak about marriage upfront but would drop hints about getting married and send me vulgar text messages”.

On Friday, PTI’s Central Information Secretary Shafqat Mahmood confirmed that the tweets had been shared from Mr Haque’s account but claimed that the account had been hacked.

He tweeted (@Shafqat_Mahmood): “Just spoke to Naeem ul Haq. He told me his twitter account has been hacked and false tweets regarding Ayesha Gulalai posted in his name.”

Published in Dawn, August 5th, 2017