Ousted Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his daughter Maryam, both facing lengthy prison terms, were arrested minutes after landing in the country on Friday as they returned seeking to revitalize their flagging party ahead of a July 25 election.
Underscoring the tensions gripping Pakistan in the run-up to the poll, a suicide bomber had killed more than 100 people at an election rally a few hours earlier, in the deadliest such attack in the country in more than three years.
"I'm aware of the fact that I'll be jailed, but it's a very small price to pay for the great mission to save the sanctity of the vote in Pakistan," Sharif told Reuters on board the plane minutes before touching down in the central city of Lahore.
Uniformed men escorted the Sharifs, who were sentenced in absentia on corruption charges last week, off the commercial flight, and a spokesman for their Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party confirmed they were arrested soon afterwards.
Clashes broke out on Friday evening at the main highway entry point to Lahore between pro-Sharif protesters and police who had been deployed in their thousands, a Reuters witness said. There were no immediate reports of injuries.
After their arrest at the airport in Lahore, Sharif and his daughter were immediately put on another plane and flown to the capital Islamabad, PML-N media coordinator Muhammad Mehdi said.
Local media said they were then taken to Adiala jail in the nearby garrison town of Rawalpindi.
Their swift departure prevented PML-N workers staging a hero's welcome on the streets of Lahore, where Sharif's brother, Shehbaz, led between 10,000 and 20,000 party supporters on a march in defiance off a citywide ban on public gatherings ordered by the caretaker government that took over in June, as Pakistan's constitution requires in the lead-in to an election.
Pakistan's third major political movement, the Pakistan Peoples Party, joined the criticism of the crackdown, with its prime ministerial candidate Bilawal Bhutto Zardari questioning why Sharif's supporters would be prevented from gathering.
Sharif returned from Britain after an anti-corruption court handed him a 10-year jail term and sentenced his daughter and political heir to seven years in prison over the purchase of luxury flats in London in the 1990s.
The suicide blast that ripped through a crowd at a political rally in southwest Pakistan on Friday, killed 128 people and wounded 150, officials told AFP.
ISIS claimed responsibility for the blast, which took place in the town of Mastung, near the Balochistan provincial capital Quetta.
