Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan and his wife were sentenced to 14 years in prison on Wednesday for corruption, his lawyer and prison officials said, a day after another special court convicted Khan of leaking state secrets and sentenced him to 10 years in prison.
The latest verdict is Khan’s third since he was ousted in 2022.
Khan and his wife are accused in the latest case of keeping and selling government gifts when the former prime minister was in power.
The court also disqualified Khan from holding any public office for several years, ahead of Pakistan’s February 8 parliamentary elections. Khan’s lawyer Babar Awan said the former prime minister was convicted in such a hurry that the judge did not wait for his legal team to arrive.
He said Khan’s basic human and fundamental rights were violated and the latest conviction and sentence would be challenged in higher courts.
“It seems that the judge was in a hurry to announce the verdict,” he said.
Zulfiqar Bukhari, the chief spokesman for Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, or PTI, also confirmed the conviction and sentence.
The latest development comes three weeks after Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi were charged with corruption for withholding state gifts, including jewelry and watches from the Saudi Arabian government, authorities said.
The latest court decision was another blow to Khan. He and Bibi pleaded not guilty when the charges were read out in court at a prison in the garrison city of Rawalpindi earlier this month.
However, Khan’s lawyer Gohar Ali Khan said his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party would challenge the sentence in the Islamabad High Court.
“We will challenge this sentence in Islamabad High and Supreme Court and hope to get justice,” the lawyer said.
Khan was accused of exposing an official secret when he waved a classified diplomatic letter at the 2022 rally.
The former cricketer faces a series of charges and was removed in a no-confidence vote in April 2022.
