Rizwan and Imam spent four hours with Pakistan’s cybercrime agency, and their phones were already there

Mohammad Rizwan and Imam-ul-Haq spent Thursday inside a government building in Lahore answering questions from Pakistan’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency, which is looking into alleged leaks from the Pakistan dressing room during the Test tour of England. Dawn reported that the session ran for about four hours, and that both players asked for more time before submitting written responses.

Their phones were already with the agency. The Pakistan Cricket Board had handed the devices over, and both players agreed to let investigators run a forensic examination of them. The questions, according to reports in Pakistan, covered who the two men were in contact with and who they met during practice sessions and matches in England.

The complaint that started all this came from the PCB itself. The NCCIA did not respond to requests for comment, and a board spokesperson confirmed the inquiry exists but would not discuss it while it runs.

How Pakistan cricket got here

The tour has been a wreck. England won the first Test at Headingley by an innings and 103 runs inside three days, then won at Lord’s by 194 runs to take the series with a match to spare. Pakistan’s response was the largest mid-tour cull in recent memory: seven players were sent home after Lord’s, Rizwan and Imam among them, along with Salman Ali Agha, Ali Usman, Aamir Jamal, Muhammad Awais Zafar and Khurram Shahzad.

The coaching staff went too. Sarfaraz Ahmed was removed as head coach and replaced by Mike Hesson, who had been running the white-ball side, and bowling coach Umar Gul made way for the former Australia seamer Ashley Noffke. Five of the seven replacements called up were uncapped at Test level.

The selection row that came first

Before any of this reached a law enforcement agency, it was a fight about selection. On 31 August the PCB issued a show-cause notice to its selection committee, asking Aqib Javed, Misbah-ul-Haq and Asad Shafiq to justify in writing, within 24 hours, why Rizwan and Imam had been picked for the England Tests at all.

Misbah emailed in his resignation instead. He had joined the committee only in March and, by his account, was not consulted about the replacements flown out to England. Losing a selector over a squad he had been asked to defend tells you how far the trust had gone.

The calf that became a public argument

Imam’s role in this is tangled up with an injury. He tore his left calf while fielding on the opening day at Lord’s, the PCB confirmed a grade-1 tear after scans and advised ten days of rest, and he did not bat in either innings at Lord’s. Two days later, former chief selector Mohammad Wasim went on his YouTube channel and said he did not believe the injury was real, claiming a physio had spoken to him beforehand and that coaches had complained about similar episodes in the past.

Wasim offered no evidence beyond his own account, and the board’s medical statement said the opposite. But the accusation was out, and the gap between a scan and a former selector’s video is where this whole story has been living for two weeks.

Why the police involvement matters

Cricket boards run internal inquiries all the time. Handing player phones to a cybercrime agency while the series is still being played is something else, and it is not obvious where the line now sits between a disciplinary matter and a criminal one.

The overlap at the top does not help. Mohsin Naqvi chairs the PCB, the body that filed the complaint, and is also Pakistan’s interior minister, the office that oversees the agency handling it. Neither role is secret and neither is new, but the two of them sitting in the same person makes an unusual case look stranger still.

None of it has stopped the cricket. Pakistan were bowled out for 133 in their first innings of the third Test at Edgbaston and are still fighting to save the match, with two of the batters who might have been in that top order answering questions in Lahore instead.

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