Pakistan Sentences Former PM Imran Khan and Wife to 17 Years for Graft

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, were each sentenced to 17 years in prison for corruption on Saturday.

Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), denounced the ruling as a “black chapter in history” and declared there is “no rule of law in Pakistan.”

“A closed-door jail trial is neither free nor fair. It is, in fact, a military trial,” PTI declared on its X social media account.

Khan and his party generally dismiss the hundreds of charges filed against him after he was ousted as prime minister by a no-confidence vote in April 2022 as political fabrications – designed to keep the popular Islamist politician and former cricket star in prison so he cannot stage a political comeback.

Khan is already in prison, having been arrested and jailed in 2023 on other corruption charges. His supporters rioted across the country after he was given a lengthy prison sentence, adding more charges of terrorism and fomenting unrest to the bill against Khan.

Over 1,300 extra police officers and security troops were deployed on Saturday across the city of Rawalpindi, where the verdict was announced, after Khan urged his supporters to once again take to the streets and protest the latest sentence handed down against him.

“Like the baseless decisions and sentences of the last three years, the Toshakhana-II decision is also nothing new to me. This decision was given in haste by the judge without any evidence and without fulfilling the legal requirements,” the former prime minister said.

Khan, who is now 73 years old, said during a jailhouse interview that he and Bibi have been “continuously subjected to mental torture by keeping us in solitary confinement.”

“There is a ban on our books, TV, and meetings. Every prisoner in jail can watch TV, but even watching TV has been banned for me and Bibi Bushra,” he said.

The Toshakhana is the Pakistani government agency that supervises gifts to the prime minister, and other public officials, from foreign dignitaries. All such gifts are supposed to be held by the Toshakhana until an official leaves office, at which time they can purchase any of the gifts they were given, using their own funds.

Khan and Bibi were accused of improperly keeping foreign gifts and selling them for personal profit. The Toshakhana case was the source of the arrest warrant that finally put Khan behind bars, after several attempts to take him into custody in 2023 were foiled by mobs of his angry supporters, and it was long seen as the most serious of the cases pending against him.

There are two separate cases related to the Toshakhana pending against Khan, which is why he described Saturday’s verdict as pertinent to “Toshakhana-II.”

The second case concerns a set of Bulgari jewelry presented to Bibi by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) during a state visit in 2021. Khan allegedly finagled a private firm into dramatically undervaluing the jewelry so he could buy it at a massive discount from the Toshakhana repository when he left office. According to prosecutors, the jewels were worth over $285,000, but Khan managed to buy them for just $10,000.

Khan was convicted in the first Toshakhana case in January 2024 and sentenced to 14 years in prison, but that conviction is currently pending appeal. He was already jailed in 2024 on a three-year conviction on yet other charges of selling state gifts, and he was then sentenced to ten years for improperly retaining state documents.

“You think Imran is going to spend 10 years in jail for a necklace being underpriced. Seriously? That’s 17 years of conviction? Of course, it is a fraudulent set-up. This is a collapsed judicial system,” Khan’s sister Aleema Khanum scoffed to Al Jazeera News on Saturday.

“The legal counsel of Imran Khan hasn’t provided a single document that can be in his defense. So saying this was a weak case on the prosecution’s side, no, it was a very strong case on the prosecution’s side,” retorted Pakistani high court advocate Tania Bazai.

“One of the main witnesses was the principal secretary of Imran Khan, and the military secretary of Imran Khan at that time, who came with solid evidence. This entire case is based on documented evidence,” Bazai said.

Speaking through the intermediaries who run his social media accounts, Khan said on Sunday that Pakistan is “being governed solely by Asim law” – in other words, a dictatorship run by the head of the Pakistani military, Asim Munir.

“Here, verdicts are pre-written and merely announced aloud,” he charged.