Mohsin Naqvi

Eight people, including a former chief minister, a member of the National Assembly and the speaker of the provincial assembly, were held in "preventive custody" in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa by 12 October 2026, and it was Mohsin Naqvi's interior ministry that confirmed it. Minister of State for Interior Talal Chaudhry said former KP chief minister Sohail Afridi and some cabinet members had been taken into preventive custody; Dawn reported that a senior police official put the number at eight, including National Assembly member Junaid Akbar and provincial assembly speaker Babar Saleem Swati. Talal Chaudhry said people facing cases would be charged and tried and that others would be released. PTI leaders called the detentions an attack on the elected provincial mandate.

The human effect is concrete. Emergency rule moved provincial functions away from the elected PTI administration while its senior figures were detained or unreachable, and protests followed. On 14 October, five PTI workers were injured in clashes with police in Bara, and authorities reported 42 arrests over vandalism and unrest.

The government's strongest defence is that KP's elected administration had disengaged from counterterrorism as militancy worsened, and the 12 October Apex Committee that Naqvi attended backed stronger police and Counter-Terrorism Department capacity. That security claim has to be tested separately from the question that now sits with Naqvi's ministry: whether preventive detention of elected politicians was lawful, proportionate and time-limited.

What comes next: court challenges to the emergency proclamation and to the detentions, and whether the interior ministry files charges against the detained officials or releases them, as Talal Chaudhry said it would.