Veteran actor Mustafa Qureshi decides to join PTI

KARACHI: Veteran film actor Mustafa Qureshi has decided to join Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf after meeting a Karachi-based leader of the party on Wednesday.

Just ahead of the elections, Qureshi left the PPP for the Imran Khan-led PTI. The Pakistani actor met PTI leader Khurram Sher Zaman and decided to join the party, reports said here.

Qureshi will make a formal announcement in this regard at a press conference.

He was associated with the PPP for over four decades. In 2014, the actor had expressed its reservations with the PPP, saying it was no longer the party of Shaheed Benazir Bhutto and Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto,

During that period, he had also expressed his support for the demands made public by Imran Khan during the 2014 sit-in against the PML-N government in Islamabad.

Qureshi had met PPP founder Zulfikar Bhutto over four decades ago and became member of the party since then.

In one interview in the past, the veteran actor said that he was the ideological worker, who was bred on the resistance of General Ayub Khan’s era. “I had seen the wave of popularity created by Bhutto, and supported it against dictatorship.”

Recalling how he met Bhutto, he had said: “I lived in Hyderabad around four decades ago and worked for Radio Pakistan. We were in a hotel for a small meeting where Bhutto was going to speak. I was introduced to him as a radio artist. Instead of shaking my hand, Bhutto gave me hug. Bhutto had so much respect for the artists.”

But after developing differences with the party policies, Qureshi like some of the old party loyalists also took a step back.

“That party [PPP] is not the same anymore,” he said in an interview.