Imran Khan’s party to challenge cases after ex-PM, spouse indicted in state gifts case

ISLAMABAD: Former prime minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party said on Tuesday it would challenge the “false cases” against its founding leader after an accountability court indicted him and his wife in a case involving the illegal sale of state gifts.
Khan, who was ousted from power in a no-confidence vote in April 2022, has been facing a slew of legal cases which PTI says are meant to keep him away from Pakistan’s political landscape ahead of the next national elections.
Currently, he is serving a three-year sentence at a high-security prison in Rawalpindi in a case popularly known as the Toshakhana – or state repository – reference after a local court convicted him in response to a complaint filed by the election commission for not stating the details of the gifts he retained in his financial statement.
The country’s anti-graft body filed another reference as an extension of the same case in which it accused him and his wife, Bushra Bibi, getting an undervalued market assessment of an expensive jewelry set before keeping it for personal use.
The couple is also facing the allegation of accepting land and financial donations under dubious circumstances in another reference called the Al-Qadir case.
“We had completed our arguments on Imran Khan’s bail in the Al-Qadir and Toshakhana cases almost three weeks ago, but there were delays,” Naeem Haider Panjutha, Khan’s spokesman on legal affairs, said in a social media post. “Sometimes the prosecutor had back pain, sometimes he was unwell and sometimes dates were set just like that.”
“Three weeks later, Judge Bashir made a decision [of indictment] that was known from the first day,” he continued. “We will challenge it in the high court. These are false cases with no kind of evidence whatsoever.”
According to the local media, the indictment took place during a hearing of the case in Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail where Khan has been incarcerated.
The former Pakistani prime minister is also facing prison trial on charges of divulging state secrets.
He was also “arrested” on Tuesday in another case in which the authorities plan to try him for instigating an attack on the army headquarters last year in May after he was briefly arrested on corruption allegations from the compound of the Islamabad High Court.