ISLAMABAD - Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the anti-graft agency to release former prime minister Imran Khan from its custody, broadcaster Geo TV reported.

Khan’s arrest on Tuesday over a land fraud case sparked deadly and widespread protests across the South Asian country, prompting the government to call in the army to help restore order.

“Your arrest was invalid, so the whole process needs to be backtracked,” Pakistan’s top judge Umar Ata Bandial told Khan, who was presented before the court that has heard an appeal against his arrest.

Nearly 2,000 people have been arrested so far and at least five killed after Khan’s supporters clashed with police, attacked military establishments and set other state buildings and assets ablaze, prompting the government to call in the army to help restore order.

The 70-year-old Khan, a cricket hero-turned-politician, was ousted as prime minister in April 2022 in a parliamentary no-confidence vote but remained Pakistan’s most popular leader according to opinion polls.

Violence triggered by his arrest has aggravated instability in the country of 220 million people that is grappling with a severe economic crisis. The crisis has eroded hopes of a quick resumption of an International Monetary Fund bailout programme.

Tensions remained high on Thursday with troops and police on the streets in major cities.

In the eastern city of Lahore, Khan’s home town, where protesters ransacked the house of a top army general on Tuesday, troops held a flag march.

In the capital Islamabad, footage shared by a police official showed military jeeps with mounted guns lined up on the side of a road and soldiers holding assault rifles.

Mobile data services remained suspended and schools and offices were closed in two of Pakistan’s four provinces.

The army has warned Khan’s supporters it will respond firmly if there are further attacks on its assets, saying in a statement on Wednesday that during the violence it showed “restraint, patience and tolerance”.

“Such a spectacle has never been witnessed in the last 75 years,” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in a televised address. “People were made hostages in their vehicles, patients were taken out of the ambulances and later, those vehicles were torched”.

The authorities had also arrested at least three senior leaders of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party as at Thursday.

The federal government approved requests on Wednesday from two of Pakistan’s four provinces – Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, both Khan strongholds – and the federal capital Islamabad to deploy troops to restore order.

Police have arrested more than 1,650 protesters in Khan’s home province of Punjab for violence, the police chief’s office said in a statement. Some 80 workers of Khan’s party were also arrested in the southwestern city of Quetta, police said.

Separately, Khan was indicted by a Pakistani court in an unrelated case on Wednesday for unlawfully selling state gifts during his premiership between 2018 and 2022. He has denied any wrongdoing.

The corruption cases against Khan are two of more than 100 cases registered against him since his ouster last year.

In most of the cases, Khan faces being barred from holding public office if convicted, with a national election scheduled for November.

He has not slowed his campaign against the ouster even after being wounded in a November attack on his convoy as he led a protest march to Islamabad calling for snap general elections. REUTERS, AFP