Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was sentenced to ten years in prison on Tuesday, less than two weeks before the country’s election, which his party is barred from contesting.
Khan’s punishment was handed out inside Adiala jail, where he has been detained for much of the time since his arrest in August and is buried by a slew of court cases that he claims were engineered to prevent him from returning to government.
Shah Mehmood Qureshi, vice-president of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and Khan’s former foreign minister, received the same punishment.
“Former Prime Minister Imran Khan and PTI Vice-President Qureshi have been sentenced to 10 years each,” a party official told AFP.
The convictions and penalties were also reported by state-run media.
The case against both men stemmed from charges that they leaked classified state papers.
Khan was prime minister from 2018 to 2022, when he was deposed in a no-confidence vote after losing the support of the country’s military rulers.
As opposition leader, he mounted an extraordinary campaign of resistance against the top brass, accusing them of overthrowing him in a US-backed conspiracy and orchestrating an assassination attempt that left him injured.
Khan was briefly imprisoned in May, and Islamabad used the ensuing protests to justify a broad crackdown on the PTI, in which several senior figures defected or went underground.
“This is a murder of justice,” declared Tauseef Ahmed Khan, a human rights campaigner and political commentator.
“But his popularity among the people will grow in leaps and bounds as his sympathisers will increase because of this gross injustice.”
The PTI has been mostly absent from the public sphere in the run-up to elections.
The party has been stripped of its election emblem, and candidates must run as individuals.
At the same time, Nawaz Sharif, the leader of one of Pakistan’s dynastic parties, has returned from self-imposed exile, and his numerous convictions have been overturned in court.
Analysts believe it is an indication that the three-time former prime minister is the preferred candidate of Pakistan’s top brass, who have ruled directly for much of the country’s history.
According to Pakistan’s constitution, elections must be held within 90 days of parliament’s dissolution, which occurred five months ago in August.
The election commission attributed the delay to the necessity to revise constituency boundaries after a fresh census in 2023.
In the meantime, Pakistan has been run by a caretaker government seen as pliable by the military establishment.