On Tuesday, on August 29, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) in Pakistan suspended the three-year prison sentence handed to former Prime Minister Imran Khan in the Toshakhana corruption case. However, despite being granted bail, Khan remained in detention at the Attock District Jail on Tuesday on court orders in relation to a different case.
The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader was arrested from his residence in Lahore on August 5 after a court in Islamabad convicted him of “corrupt practices” in the Toshakhana case brought by the Electoral Commission of Pakistan (ECP). The Toshakhana is a government department that stores gifts received by government officials in Pakistan. Officials, including the prime minister, may purchase these gifts from the Toshakhana at a certain price.
In October 2022, the ECP declared that Khan had made “false statements and incorrect declarations” regarding gifts he received, purchased (retained from the Toshakhana), and sold during his time in office. This was after the ECP received a complaint filed by the speaker of the National Assembly, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, received from the Pakistan People’s Party in August.
The items in the Toshakhana case are worth 140 million Pakistani rupees (USD 500,000).
In May 2023, the District and Sessions Court in Islamabad indicted Khan. His arrest prompted violent unrest in the country. The ruling was later overturned by the IHC. Following a back and forth between the two courts, Khan was finally convicted and sentenced in absentia by the lower court on August 5, and was additionally ordered to pay a fine of 100,000 Pakistani rupees (USD 328) by the trial court. Soon after the ruling was announced, he was arrested.
Speaking to Peoples Dispatch on August 6, Dr. Taimur Rahman from the Mazdoor Kisan Party stated, “The real purpose of this case and conviction is to knock out Imran Khan from politics, that is what the establishment and the current government wants… because they are unable to compete with his very aggressive rhetoric, much of which is not necessarily true but it is effective in that it has managed to attract a substantive section of the population.”
On August 8, the ECP announced that Khan had been barred from holding public office for a period of five years. Pakistan is due to hold general elections later this year after the parliament was dissolved earlier this month.
Last week, the IHC initiated a hearing on a plea against Khan’s conviction and sentencing. Meanwhile, the country’s Supreme Court stated that there had been “procedural defects” in the sessions court’s verdict.
However, as Khan was set to be released from jail on Tuesday, a special court directed authorities to remand him in “judicial lockup” and to produce him before the court on August 30. The hearing was held at the Attock Jail on Thursday, following which Judge Abual Hasnat Zulqurnain extended Khan’s judicial remand until September 13.
Case under Official Secrets Act
The special court was set up on August 21 to hear cases under the Official Secrets Act. On August 15, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) had registered a case against Khan under this Act for making a classified diplomatic cable (or cipher) public. Also named in the case is former Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi.
Speaking to AFP, Khan’s lawyers said that he had been arrested in the cipher case before Tuesday’s ruling but his legal team had been “intentionally left uninformed and kept in the dark”.
Khan has maintained that his removal from office in April 2022 was the result of a conspiracy involving the US and the Pakistani military, the proof of which was contained in a cipher.
On August 9, US-based news organization The Intercept published an article with the contents of the cable, stating that it had obtained the alleged document from a source in the Pakistani military.
It included information about a meeting between US State Department officials and Asad Majeed Khan, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US at the time, in March 2022, during which Imran Khan’s stance on the war in Ukraine was discussed. Khan had visited Moscow in February.
“[P]eople here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine), if such a position is even possible. It does not seem such a neutral stand to us,” the text quotes Assistant US Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, Donald Lu, as saying.
“I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister,” Lu says, as per the report.
The Intercept’s journalist Ryan Grim has denied having any contact with Khan or anyone in the PTI during the reporting process for the August 9 article, and has not explicitly confirmed or denied if the copy given to the news publication was the same one that was allegedly in Khan’s possession.
A purported statement that has been attributed to Khan’s former Principal Secretary Azam Khan accuses him of using the cipher to build an “anti-establishment narrative,” and subsequently, of misplacing the copy of the classified document.
Khan was questioned by the FIA in the Attock Jail on August 16.
Meanwhile, news publication DAWN reported that Khan’s lawyers had filed a plea in the IHC to prevent further “illegal and unjustified arrest” in cases filed against him after August 5. Since last year, Khan is reportedly facing over 150 legal cases. A court last week granted police permission to interrogate and arrest Khan in relation to the violence in the country in May.
“This sets a negative precedent because these convictions are done with the intent of political victimization,” Rahman says. This is not to say that the evidence against Khan’s actions in the Toshakhana case is not true, however, that his conviction and his ouster before that revealed something bigger:
“Whenever one or another party falls foul of the military establishment, such convictions follow and the conclusion that will bring the people to is that there is not much of a democratic process in Pakistan. The military pre-selects those people that will stand in the election and those politicians who for that particular period in history have a decidedly anti-establishmentarian or anti-military position [as opposed to parties who are consistently anti-establishment in an ideological or theoretical sense, Rahman added later] will be completely knocked out of the race.”
Lawyers and legal experts have highlighted that given that the IHC has only suspended Khan’s sentence and not the conviction, his disqualification from the upcoming elections remains in place at present.
