On Tuesday, the court returned bail petitions filed by human rights lawyers Imaan and Hadi in the Kohsar police station protest case over the absence of signed powers of attorney.

During the proceedings, ATC Judge Tahir Abbas Sipra directed the jail superintendent to explain why he should not be sentenced to six months in prison for allegedly disobeying the court’s orders.

No representative of Adiala jail appeared before the court, while the two accused could also not be produced through video link despite a previous direction.

Dr Shireen Mazari, Imaan’s mother, and a large number of lawyers appeared before the court during the proceedings.

The judge expressed displeasure over the failure of the jail authorities to obtain Imaan and Hadi’s signatures on the powers of attorney, which are required to authorise lawyers to represent them in the bail proceedings.

Judge Sipra remarked that the jail superintendent should not push the court — or himself — into a corner.

He asked whether the deputy superintendent had collected the powers of attorneys from the sessions court on the relevant day.

Advocate Riasat Ali Azad told the court that he was not certain whether the documents had been collected from the court. He said the lawyers had submitted the powers of attorneys there for onward transmission to Adiala jail in compliance with the court’s order.

The serial numbers of the powers of attorneys submitted to the sessions court were subsequently presented before the bench.

The court staff informed Judge Sipra that Imaan and Hadi were not being produced through video link because the jail authorities had cited internet connectivity problems.

The judge expressed dissatisfaction with the explanation, observing that the Adiala jail authorities had also repeatedly cited internet connectivity issues in an earlier case.

He recalled that he had previously directed experts from PTCL and NTC to visit Adiala jail to resolve the connectivity problem, specifically instructing that experts be sent from Haripur.

Judge Sipra observed that obtaining and signing the vakalatnama was a fundamental right of an accused and could not be denied on account of administrative hurdles.

The court subsequently issued a show-cause notice for contempt of court to the Adiala jail superintendent and sought an explanation as to why he should not be sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.

The ATC adjourned further proceedings until Tuesday.

On January 24, an Islamabad sessions court sentenced Imaan and Hadi to a total of 17 years in jail on multiple charges under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (Peca).

However, on September 17, the Supreme Court suspended the couple’s sentences in the controversial social media posts case. The SC granted the couple bail against surety bonds of Rs200,000 and ordered their release pending the IHC’s final verdict.

Soon after their release, Islamabad police personnel, led by the SSP Operations, reached Adiala jail and arrested the two again in connection with the Kohsar police station protest case. The police subsequently produced them before the ATC late at night. However, the ATC rejected the police’s request for a 30-day physical remand of the couple and sent them to jail on judicial remand.

Noor Zaman and Mohammad Ashab Irfan both fell in straight games at the Nagoya Kinjo Futo Arena, leaving Pakistan with two bronze medals from the squash court.

Noor, Pakistan’s top-ranked player, went toe-to-toe with top seed Eain Yow Ng in a gripping opening game.

The pair traded points to 5-5 before Noor edged ahead 7-5, but the Malaysian halted his momentum and launched a comeback to take the first game 11-7 in 14 minutes.

The 28-year-old Ng was relentless thereafter.

Noor took the opening point of the second game, but Ng immediately drew level and then rattled off 10 consecutive points before Noor could respond, wrapping up the game 11-2 in just four minutes.

The Malaysian raced to a six-point lead in the third before Noor got on the board, and although the 22-year-old clawed two points back and denied Ng on his first match point, the top seed sealed victory 11-4 on his second attempt to end Pakistan’s run in the event.

Mohammad Ashab Irfan was never allowed to settle in his semi-final against second seed Abhay Singh of India.

The 22-year-old lost the first game 11-3, showed improvement in the second but still went down 12-10, before the experienced 28-year-old closed out the win 11-6 in the third to wrap up the match in 35 minutes.

Winning streak broken

The hockey team’s perfect record also came to a stunning end on Saturday as Malaysia edged Pakistan 5-4 at the Gifu Prefectural Green Stadium.

Sufyan Khan, Pakistan’s top scorer at the Games, netted all four goals from penalty corners — taking his tournament tally to nine in four matches — but could not prevent the defeat.

Pakistan opened the scoring in the third minute, only for Shello Silverius to immediately draw Malaysia level.

Faizal Saari put Malaysia ahead from a penalty corner in the 23rd minute, before Sufyan struck in the 39th and 43rd minutes to regain the lead for Pakistan.

Saari Fitri pulled Malaysia level again on the stroke of the third quarter to make it 3-3.

Pakistan started the fourth quarter brightly as Sufyan scored again in the 46th minute, while Mohammed Ammad had a shot saved before Malaysian goalkeeper Zaimi Deris Mat denied both Sufyan a fifth goal and Ghazanfar Ali.

Malaysia made Pakistan pay for the missed opportunities, with Silverius levelling once more before Azrai Abu Kamal stunned the four-time World Cup winners in the 57th minute.

Pakistan poured forward as Malaysia’s Faris Harizan was shown a green card and two penalty corners followed, but Malaysia held on.

The Green Shirts will play their final pool match against Oman on Monday.

Shuttler Mahoor crashes out

Pakistan’s star shuttler Mahoor Shahzad crashed out of the women’s singles, losing 21-5, 21-11 to Indonesia’s Putri Kusuma Wardani in a one-sided first-round match at the Ichinomiya City Municipal Gymnasium.

The national champion never found her rhythm against the 24-year-old Indonesian, who dictated every rally.

Wardani raced to a 4-0 lead before the 29-year-old Mahoor got on the scoreboard, then pulled away to take the opening game 21-5 in just 10 minutes. Mahoor failed to win a single point on her own serve in the game.

She briefly led early in the second, but Wardani drew level and reeled off five straight points to move 12-6 ahead, closing out the match 21-11 on her second match point. Mahoor managed only four points on her serve in the second game and never strung together more than three consecutive points.

Shajar sprints to semis

On the track, Shajar Abbas qualified from his 200-metre heat, finishing third in 21.23 seconds behind Japan’s Akira Hayashi (21.19) and Bahrain’s Abbas Ali (21.13) at the Nagoya City Mizuho Park Athletic Stadium.

Shajar was competing for the first time this season after recovering from an injury. The semi-finals were to be held later on Saturday, with the final scheduled for Sunday.

Disappointment in the ring

The day got even worse for Pakistan’s athletes as both boxers were ousted at the Nishio Gymnasium.

Commonwealth Games bronze medallist Fatima Zehra lost comprehensively against Mijgona Samadova of Tajikistan in their women’s 60kg bout. The 28-year-old Samadova never let Fatima settle, taking the first round 10-8 on four judges’ scorecards.

Fatima could not recover from that opening-round beating as the Tajik kept the pressure on in the second, knocking her down once.

The 22-year-old lost the second 10-8 on four cards, and while she showed great heart to take the fight the distance, the third also went against her 10-8 on three judges’ scorecards.

Earlier, Irfan Khan had a forgettable debut in the men’s 90kg category, knocked down twice in the first round by South Korea’s Gichae Kim before the referee stopped the contest in the second.

The judges had scored the opening round in Kim’s favour, with four giving the South Korean a 10-9 advantage and one scoring it 10-8. Kim added another knockdown in the second before the stoppage.

It was a partnership. It was also, for many ordinary Bangladeshis, a cage.

That cage door swung open in August 2024. A student-led uprising toppled Hasina’s government, and in the vacuum that followed, an interim administration led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus began doing something Dhaka had not seriously attempted in half a century: looking around the room at options other than India. Pakistan, once the unmentionable neighbour, became one of them.

This is not a small story, and it is not, as some in Delhi’s commentariat have framed it, a conspiracy or a betrayal. It is something more interesting and more legitimate: a mid-sized nation exercising the same right every sovereign state claims for itself — the right to diversify, hedge and choose its partners on merit rather than inheritance.

The facts on the ground are not speculative. In late 2025, Pakistan’s then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff committee, General Sahir Shamshad Mirza, travelled to Dhaka and met Yunus himself, alongside Bangladesh’s National Security Adviser and Pakistan’s High Commissioner.

The conversation covered trade, investment and defence cooperation — the ordinary vocabulary of two states rebuilding a relationship from scratch, rather than the language of grievance. It was a meeting that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier, and it happened anyway, because both capitals decided the 1971 war did not have to be the last word in their relationship forever.

Then came logistics. Direct shipping and air links between Karachi and Dhaka resumed in early 2026, ending a 14-year halt that had forced goods and people through expensive, indirect routes.

Pakistan has formally proposed that Karachi Port serve as a transit point for Bangladesh-China trade, a potentially useful option for a country seeking to reduce its dependence on any single land or sea corridor. None of this required Bangladesh to sever a single tie with India. It simply gave Dhaka a second door out of the room.

And in February 2026, Bangladeshi voters delivered a parliamentary victory to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, closing the interim chapter and installing an elected government that has, so far, continued rather than reversed the diversification Yunus began.

That is not the profile of a policy imposed from outside. That is the profile of a policy that has, at minimum, enough domestic support to survive an actual election.

Every serious foreign policy tradition, from Bandung to the modern language of “multi-alignment” used in New Delhi’s own strategic circles, treats diversification as a sign of maturity, not disloyalty.

Vietnam balances China and the United States. India itself buys Russian oil and American weapons in the same year. Bangladesh doing the equivalent — keeping Indian trade ties alive while opening channels to Pakistan, China and Turkey — is not radical. It is simply Bangladesh graduating into the same club.

For Pakistan, the opportunity here is real, but it demands restraint, not triumphalism. The goal cannot be to replace India in Bangladesh’s strategic imagination; it should be to build something narrower and more durable: a working relationship based on trade volume, defence-industry cooperation and a shared voice in forums such as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, rather than on nostalgia or shared grievance against a common rival.

Pakistan has spent years quietly inviting Bangladeshi officials to training programmes and institutional exchanges that went largely unanswered during the Awami League years. That patience is now paying a modest, overdue dividend. Islamabad should bank it soberly.

Critics inside and outside Bangladesh warn that leaning towards Islamabad, and towards Beijing’s defence and technology ecosystem by extension, could reopen the wounds of the Liberation War or drag Dhaka into someone else’s rivalry with New Delhi. These are not frivolous concerns, and Pakistan does itself no favours by dismissing them.

The honest answer is that friendship carries risks in every direction. Over-dependence on India carried its own risks for decades, ones Bangladeshis lived with quietly until 2024 made the cost visible. A Bangladesh that trades with everyone and is owned by no one is a healthier Bangladesh than one locked into a single patron, whichever capital that patron sits in.

Strip away the geopolitics-as-scoreboard framing that dominates so much commentary on this shift, and what is left is a simpler story: a country that spent five decades as someone else’s periphery is trying, however imperfectly, to become the subject of its own foreign policy rather than an object of someone else’s. Pakistan is one of several doors that opened when the old order in Dhaka fell. Turkey is another. China is a third. The United States and the wider West remain very much in the picture too.

Bangladesh’s voters, not Islamabad or Beijing, will ultimately decide how far this recalibration goes through the ballot box, as they already did in February 2026. That is exactly how it should work. A more autonomous Bangladesh, comfortable enough in its own sovereignty to talk to Pakistan without treating the conversation as treason, is not a loss for the region. It is what a genuinely post-colonial South Asia was always supposed to look like.

The governor urged people to stay home after almost 300 millimetres of rain fell since Thursday afternoon, while Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said he was cutting short a trip to London to return.

“The water keeps coming in. It’s hard to go out now. It’s like at my waist level now,” said Somkid Pheuk-ngam, 67, a vendor who lives near a canal just north of central Bangkok.

“I cannot go anywhere. I have been closing my shop for two days now,” she told AFP, adding that while she often gets flooded, “I think this time is worse than the 2011 flood.”

Widespread deluges across Thailand in 2011 killed more than 500 people and damaged millions of homes.

Almost continuous rain since Thursday afternoon has swelled Bangkok’s network of canals, sending murky water into surrounding homes, restaurants, shops and alleyways.

Numerous major roads were also flooded on Saturday, AFP reporters saw, while residents were forced to wade through knee- or sometimes thigh-high water in several different neighbourhoods.

The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) declared a disaster for all the city’s 50 districts, a move which gives local organisations special powers to act.

“I woke up to go to work and the street in front of my house was flooded,” said motorbike rider Samruay Nakkamnueng in the Ari neighbourhood.

“I worried if my motorbike would be able to wade through this much floodwater.”

In the On Nut neighbourhood, an AFP reporter saw locals filling sandbags to take home to protect their homes and businesses.

Bangkok authorities said they had prepared one million sandbags for distribution and has opened several temporary shelters in schools.

‘Every canal filled’

Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt said the east of the city was most impacted and warned more rain was forecast.

“The rain keeps falling and we are doing our best. We are trying to pump the water out,” he said on social media on Saturday morning.

“The risk areas are those who live near canals. Every canal is now filled.”

Water levels later began to stabilise thanks to the city’s pumping stations, which were operating at full capacity, pumping some 1,200 cubic meters per second combined, the BMA said.

“If there is no additional rainfall, the situation is expected to improve within six hours,” it said in a lunchtime update.

Once dubbed the “Venice of the East” because of its canals, Bangkok is built on former marshland and rests about 1.5 metres above sea level.

Chadchart urged bedridden patients depending on life-saving medical equipment to consider a temporary stay in hospital.

He also advised residents to move their cars to higher ground, and Bangkok’s public transport authority offered free access to MRT train “park and ride” carparks to store their vehicles, until October 2.

Wetter than usual

Municipal workers were busy on Saturday trying to keep the roads clear.

“Our job is to make sure rubbish along the road doesn’t block the drains, so the water can drain away quickly,” said Kwan Nobnom, one of a group wearing bright orange raincoats.

“We thought this year would be dry, so we didn’t expect the flooding to be this bad.”

September is the peak of the rainy season in Bangkok but it has been wetter than usual, according to figures from the drainage and sewage department.

The capital recorded 487 mm of rain between September 1 and 25, compared to an average of almost 269 mm for the same period from 1991-2020.

Scientists warn the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events will increase as the planet continues to heat up because of fossil fuel emissions.

The Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation warned of low pressure across eastern, northeastern and central Thailand until Sunday.

Speaking at the 27th informal meeting of the Economic Cooperation Organisation (ECO) in New York, he said the sincerity and dedication of Pakistan’s leadership had led it to engage closely with “brotherly countries and partners” to facilitate peaceful outcomes. “These efforts have yielded tangible progress, which we must now consolidate and preserve,” he said.

Dar said Pakistan remained determined to stay constructively engaged in the endeavour, adding that ECO member states must harness their collective strength to promote peace, resilience, solidarity and shared prosperity for nearly half a billion people.

He said the region stood at a critical juncture, facing significant challenges alongside unprecedented opportunities. Climate change was placing growing pressure on water and food security, while emerging connectivity corridors offered the prospect of linking Central and South Asia and unlocking the region’s economic potential.

Dar said the ECO required stronger political commitment and institutional reforms to respond effectively to these challenges. He called for a review and streamlining of the ECO Secretariat and affiliated institutions to ensure their mandates and structures remained responsive to evolving political and economic realities.

“Our shared objective must be to transform the ECO region into a more integrated, dynamic and competitive region within the Global South,” he said.

He said Pakistan, as chair of the ECO Council of Ministers for 2026-27, would focus particularly on trade and economic integration, connectivity and transit, trade facilitation and climate resilience.

The deputy prime minister noted that despite covering around eight million square kilometres and being home to nearly half a billion people, the ECO region accounted for only around 2.2 per cent of global trade, while intra-regional trade remained approximately 8pc of total regional trade.

“These figures underscore the considerable untapped potential,” he said, calling for the experience of successful regional organisations to be used to deepen economic integration.

On connectivity and transit, Dar said strengthening transport networks, harmonising customs procedures and improving transit systems must remain central to the ECO agenda.

He called for the accelerated operationalisation of key corridors linking Central Asia with ports on the Arabian Sea, saying Pakistan was ready to serve as a gateway for the region by leveraging its strategic location and liberalised visa regime to facilitate the movement of people and goods.

On trade facilitation, he said the ECO Trade Agreement remained an important instrument for regional economic integration.

“We should build on the roadmap adopted by ECO trade ministers in November 2025 and move towards a functional and digitally enabled ECO Free Trade Area that expands market access, supports businesses and promotes innovation,” he said.

Dar also highlighted climate change as a serious and growing threat to water security, agriculture and livelihoods in the region.

He called for stronger cooperation on disaster risk reduction, climate-resilient infrastructure, sustainable energy and adaptation.

He expressed confidence that the informal Council of Ministers meeting would provide fresh impetus to the regional agenda and help translate common aspirations into practical outcomes.

As Pakistan prepares to host the 30th ECO Council of Ministers meeting in Islamabad in November, Dar said Islamabad looked forward to working closely with all member states and the ECO Secretariat.

He also said Pakistan was advancing the Strategic Goals of Economic Cooperation 2026-2035, which would provide a framework for regional cooperation over the coming decade.

The deputy prime minister appreciated ECO Secretary General Dr Asad Majeed Khan and the ECO Secretariat for their efforts to advance the organisation’s agenda.

“Pakistan regards ECO as a vital platform for regional cooperation and a cornerstone of our shared aspirations in Asia,” he said, adding that the task was to translate the region’s collective potential into greater connectivity, deeper economic integration and shared prosperity.

Later, the Foreign Office (FO) also shared Dar’s statement issued at the meeting.

Afghanistan

Dar also emphasised the importance of peace and stability for regional prosperity and development, saying terrorism emanating from Afghan soil undermined these efforts.

“Pakistan has always desired a peaceful, prosperous and stable Afghanistan that is fully integrated into the region and is at peace with itself and its neighbours,” he said, adding that this was aligned with Pakistan’s foreign policy goals of peace, development and regional integration.

He said Pakistan had pursued and advocated constructive engagement with the Taliban regime, extending bilateral and transit trade concessions to Afghanistan and pursuing the signing of a framework agreement for a feasibility study on the Uzbekistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan railway project.

“Pakistan’s only expectation was for the Taliban regime to address our legitimate security concerns,” Dar said, adding that Islamabad expected concrete and verifiable action against the TTP, BLA and their affiliates, which he said continued to threaten Pakistan’s sovereignty and the lives of its citizens.

“We believe that peace and development in the region can only be achieved with the elimination of the terrorist threat from Afghanistan,” he said.