BDnews24: “God has given me a chance to come to power to implement that ideology which I started 22 years ago,” Khan, 65, said in a televised speech from his house near the capital Islamabad.
But supporters of jailed former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said the vote count was rigged and called it an assault on democracy in a country that has a history of military rule.Khan called for “mutually beneficial” ties with Pakistan’s on-off ally the United States, and offered an olive branch to arch-foe India, saying the two nations

Imran Khan declares victory in the general election in Islamabad

should resolve the long-simmering dispute over Kashmir.
It is a stunning rise for an anti-corruption crusader who spent much of his political career on the fringes of Pakistani politics. The stock market shot up nearly 2 percent in early trading on relief that Khan was expected to be able to form a stable coalition. With about half the votes counted from Wednesday’s election, Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), or Pakistan Movement for Justice, was in a commanding lead in the nuclear-armed, Muslim-majority nation, the country’s election commission said.
Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and rival Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) both said their monitors in many voting centres were either kicked out during counting or had not received the official notifications of the precinct’s results, but instead got hand-written tallies that they could not verify. “It is a sheer rigging. The way the people’s mandate has blatantly been insulted, it is intolerable,” Shehbaz, PML-N president and Nawaz Sharif’s brother, told a news conference as the counting continued.