Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan Shot in Leg at Protest Rally

Separately, footage showed a bystander tackled a man with a pistol in his hand, pushing the apparent attacker’s raised gun down toward the ground. The man was chased by the crowd, videos showed.  

Yasmin Rashid,

a provincial lawmaker from Mr. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, said that the former prime minister had been shot in the leg.

“God saved him,” she said.

Mr. Khan was rushed to the cancer hospital he founded before entering politics in the city of Lahore. The head of the hospital,

Faisal Sultan,

said that Mr. Khan was stable.

X-rays and scans showed bullet fragments lodged in Mr. Khan’s legs, and that his right shin bone was chipped, said Dr. Sultan, who had also served as Mr. Khan’s health minister.  

Several other members of his party were also injured, said party officials.

“There should be an inquiry,” Faisal Javed Khan, a senator from Mr. Khan’s party, with blood on his clothes, told reporters. “But our spirits are strong.”

Prime Minister

Shehbaz Sharif

condemned the incident, and said he had ordered an immediate report from the Interior Ministry.

“Violence should have no place in our country’s politics,” said Mr. Sharif.

Marriyum Aurangzeb,

Pakistan’s information minister, said that the attacker had been held by police. She said that his confession was recorded by police and released to the media. Footage later aired by local channels showed a man in custody being questioned by a security official. He said that he acted alone.

“He was misleading people and I couldn’t take it,” said the man, who wasn’t named, when asked why he did it. “I tried to kill only him.”

Mr. Khan, who was ousted from power in April by a vote of no-confidence in parliament, has been leading a protest march through Punjab Province to Islamabad, the capital. The protest started last week and wasn’t expected to reach Islamabad for at least one week.

Mr. Khan is demanding that new elections be held. Since his dismissal from office, he has gained sharply in popularity, opinion polls and the results of a series of local elections have shown. Pakistan is deeply polarized between Mr. Khan’s supporters and almost all the other major political parties, which are in a coalition government that replaced Mr. Khan.