New members of KP assembly take oath amid rumpus

PESHAWAR: The session of the  Khyber Pakthunkhwa Assembly scheduled to meet at 11am today (Wednesday) faced mismanagement and couldn’t start on time to administer oath to the members. The members were administered oath after a delay of over three hours. 

Over 1,000 passes were issued to visitors against a few hundreds capacity and the unruly visitors entered even the assembly hall and occupied seats of members. When the police closed the doors of the building, the visitors, mostly PTI workers, entered the premises by scaling the walls. People from the gallery also threw plastic bottles and other items into the hall and one of it hit a PML-N female reserved seat member. Later, 115 members were administered oath by Mushtaq Ghani

In both the KP and Balochistan assemblies, the names of the speakers and deputy speakers have not been announced officially. 

In the KP assembly, the 21 reserved seats of women and four of minorities are vacant as the Election Commission of Pakistan is yet to decide to allocate the seats to Sunni Ittehad Council which independent candidates backed by the PTI have joined.

There are 26 reserved seats in the assembly and two each have been allocated to the JUI-F and PML-N and one to the PPP.

After the members take oath, papers for the election of the speaker and deputy speaker will be filed.

The speaker and deputy speaker will be elected on Thursday. The name of Suriya Bibi from PK-1 has been finalized by the Sunni Ittehad Council.