BBC confuse Imran Khan for Wasim Akram, apologise for it

Former Pakistan cricketer Imran Khan is expected to be the next Prime Minister of the country having won the maximum seats in the recent general elections. As the media across the world covers this phenomenon where a cricketer has managed to rise to the highest possible political position in a country the British Broadcasting Council (BBC) made a mistake during their broadcast ahead of the elections.

In the prime-time news show ‘Newsnight’ BBC2 aired footage of Imran’s team-mate and dear friend Wasim Akram instead of the World Cup winning captain. They soon realized it and acknowledge it towards the end of the show. Evan Davis who was presenting the show said: “We made a mistake in our opening tonight. The footage we showed was of the cricketer Wasim Akram, not Imran Khan.”

“Don’t know how that happened, sincere apologies for that,” Davis stated. Imran since retirement was involved in active politics and even contested elections but never quite found the success. His political career has gained a lot of mileage in the last few years as the existing government and heads were charged for corruption and even impeached. Ahead of the 2018 general elections, he was considered a front-runner as his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf found its feet and connected really well with the masses.

BBC’s apology

“We’d like to reiterate the sincere apology we made on air last night for an error that occurred during the programme,” a BBC spokesperson said.

“We are looking into how this mistake happened and will be tightening our processes on Newsnight to prevent an incident like this happening again,” the spokesperson added.

His party PTI won 120 seats while PML-N won on 61 seats and the third party PPP got 40 seats. This isn’t the number that gives him an absolute majority to form the government as the magic figure is 137 however while addressing the people, Imran said: “We were successful and we were given a mandate.”

As per reports in Pakistani media, PTI is looking to crack a coalition to soon stake a claim as the single largest party.

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