LAHORE - Former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan was shot in the shin on Thursday when his anti-government protest convoy came under attack in the east of the country in what his aides said was a clear assassination attempt.

Shots were fired at Mr Khan and other officials standing on a modified container truck as it slowly drove through a thick crowd near Gujranwala.

“There was a guy who was in front of the container who had this automatic pistol,” said former information minister Fawad Chaudhry, who was standing behind Mr Khan. “He fired a burst. Everyone who was standing in the very front row got hit.”

The spokesman for Mr Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party said supporters in the crowd tried to snatch the gun from the attacker. “In that scuffle, he missed the target. There was so much blood on the container.”

Six people on the truck were hit and one supporter was killed, he said. “If the shooter had not been stopped by people there, the entire PTI leadership would have been wiped out.”

“It was a clear assassination attempt,” he said, adding that Mr Khan was taken to hospital in Lahore and his condition is stable.

TV channels showed footage of a man they said was the suspect, who looked to be in his 20s or 30s. He said in the video that he wanted to kill Mr Khan and acted alone.

“(Mr Khan) was misleading the people and I couldn’t bear it,” he said.

Pakistan has a long history of political violence. Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in December 2007 in a gun and bomb attack after holding an election rally in the city of Rawalpindi. In the same city, her father and former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged in 1979 after he was deposed by a military coup.

Mr Khan, 70, was leading a protest march in Islamabad to demand snap elections. There were hundreds of people in the convoy. He had planned to lead the motorised caravan slowly northwards up the Grand Trunk Road to Islamabad, drawing more support along the way before entering the capital.

Party colleague Faisal Javed, who was also wounded and had blood stains on his clothes, told Geo TV from the hospital: “Several of our colleagues are wounded. We heard that one of them is dead.”

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned the shooting and ordered the Interior Minister to seek an immediate investigation.

In a tweet, Pakistan’s President Arif Alvi called it “a heinous assassination attempt”.

“I thank Allah that he is safe but injured with few bullets in his leg & hopefully non-critical,” he tweeted.

A former international cricket star, Mr Khan was booted from office in April by a no-confidence vote after defections by some of his coalition partners, but he retains mass public support in the country.

Mr Khan was voted into power in 2018 on an anti-corruption platform by an electorate tired of dynastic politics.

But his mishandling of the economy – and falling out with a military accused of helping his rise – sealed his fate.

Since then, he has railed against the establishment and Mr Sharif’s government, which he says was imposed on Pakistan by a “conspiracy” involving the United States.

He has repeatedly told supporters he was prepared to die for the country and aides have long warned of unspecified threats made on his life.

Mr Khan is among a long list of elected Pakistani prime ministers who failed to serve their full terms. None has done so since independence in 1947. REUTERS, AFP