VIDEO: Police arrested PTI’s former rights minister Shireen in Islamabad: Daughter

Tariq Butt, Correspondent / AP

Pakistan's former human rights minister Shireen Mazari was arrested on Saturday in the capital over a decades-old land grabbing allegation, her daughter and another former minister said.

Shireen Mazari, who served in the cabinet-level position under former prime minister Imran Khan, was detained by police near her Islamabad home, daughter Imaan Mazari said in a tweet.

She said "male police have beaten and taken my mother away and I have been told that anti corruption wing of Lahore has arrested her.”

Footage on local Geo TV showed female police officers detaining Mazari. As Shireen Mazari reached her house in a posh Islamabad sector, the waiting police party asked her to come out of her car. She resisted but in vain. At one stage, she abused the female officers.

In footage of her arrest which was aired by broadcasters by TV channels, she could be seen being dragged out of a car by female police personnel while she could be heard protesting: "No. Don't touch me."

Unidentified voices in the footage could be heard telling her that "there is no issue" and the matter could be discussed "peacefully". "You are using violence. Don't you take my phone...," Mazari could be heard saying in response.

Outside the Kohsar police station of Islamabad, a visibly distraught Imaan Zainab termed her mother's detention a "kidnapping". "She was kidnapped - I won't say she was arrested," she said, standing alongside PTI senior leaders Fawad Chaudhry and Shibli Faraz. "When someone is arrested, the police inform you on what charge [a person] is taken away for," she added.

"I don't know where she is. She has been forcibly disappeared by this government because they think women are soft targets." "I won't spare anyone if anything happens to my mother."

He alleged the senior leader in Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf party had been politically targeted by the new administration of Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif under the guise of a land dispute allegation dating back to 1972.

Mazari has been critical of Shahbaz Sharif's government in tweets since Imran Khan's government was toppled in a no-confidence vote in parliament last month.

Imran is mobilising supporters through public rallies across the country to pressure the government into an early election.