PAKISTAN – Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi have been sentenced to another 17 years in jail following a corruption case involving State gifts.
The former Pakistan prime minister, (73) was found guilty of breaking the country’s rules on gifts alongside his wife, after she received a luxury jewellery set from Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman during a 2021 State visit. The couple are already serving prison sentences and the new convictions, 10 years for criminal breach of trust and seven for criminal misconduct, will run concurrently with their previous terms.
Prosecutors claimed the pair profited by buying the jewellery for US$10 000, compared with their market rate of US$285 521, before selling them.
The ruling is the latest legal setback for Khan, who has faced a multitude of cases since his government was removed from power in 2022.
Khan, incarcerated since 2023 on more than 150 charges, including leaking State secrets and selling State gifts, has denied the charges and accused authorities of political persecution. He has been held in solitary confinement in Adiala jail in Rawalpindi, in what his sons describe as a ‘death cell’.
His family feared he died earlier month and were barred, alongside Khan’s lawyers, from visiting him in November.
‘‘He’s in a death cell. What they are doing to my father is barbaric,’’ Kasim Khan, 26, told The Times.
The former cricketer is ‘being held in a 6ft by 8ft cell, usually kept for those on death row’, Kasim and brother Sulaiman (29) claim, ‘allowed no reading material apart from the Quran and given dirty brown water to drink and wash with’.
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