Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi have been sentenced to 17 years in prison after a Pakistani court found them guilty of illegally retaining and selling valuable state gifts.
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The sentence, handed down on Saturday, capped a years-long saga that saw the duo accused of selling various gifts – including jewellery from the Saudi Arabian government – at far below market value. They have denied all charges.
In order to keep gifts from foreign dignitaries, Pakistani law requires officials to purchase them at market value and to declare profits from any sales.
But prosecutors claimed that the couple profited from the items after purchasing them at an artificially low price of $10,000, compared with their market rate of $285,521.
Khan’s supporters were quick to denounce the ruling, with his spokesperson Zulfikar Bukhari saying that “criminal liability was imposed without proof of intent, gain, or loss, relying instead on a retrospective reinterpretation of rules”.
His party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, wrote on social media that the proceedings were a “sham” and criticised international media coverage of the case.
The 73-year-old former leader served as Pakistan’s prime minister from 2018 until April 2022, when he was ousted in a no-confidence vote.
He was imprisoned starting in August 2023 on various charges of corruption and revealing state secrets, all of which he has denied and claimed to be politically motivated. He has been acquitted of some charges.
An internationally famous cricket player in the heyday of his sporting career, Khan remains popular in Pakistan, with his imprisonment leading to protests throughout the last two years.
The former leader is now confined to a prison in the city of Rawalpindi and “kept inside all the time”, his sister, Uzma Khanum, told journalists earlier this month.
Khanum, a doctor who was the first family member allowed to visit Khan in weeks, described him as “very angry” about the isolation, saying that he considered the “mental torture” of imprisonment to be “worse than physical abuse”.
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