Pakistan’s Islamabad In an Islamabad court, the sentences of former Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Prime Minister Imran Khan were revoked in relation to the disclosure of state secrets.
Days before the nation’s general elections, on January 30, this year, a special court constituted at a jail in Rawalpindi condemned Khan and Qureshi to ten years in prison.
In the so-called “cypher case,” Khan asserts that a diplomatic cable supports his assertion that his ouster from office in April 2022 was the result of a plot. Khan was found guilty of abusing the private cable that a previous Pakistani ambassador to the US had transmitted, by the court set up under the Official Secrets Act.
Khan has always refuted the accusation, claiming that the paper showed proof that his political rivals and the nation’s strong military, with assistance from the US government, had planned his ouster as prime minister. The Pakistani army and Washington deny the charge.
Former cricket player Khan led Pakistan as prime minister from August 2018 to April 2022, when he was removed from office by a vote of no confidence in the legislature. He was incarcerated since august of the previous year going through trial in numerous cases.
But even after the Islamabad High Court ruled that the sentence was invalid, Khan is still incarcerated since he was found guilty in a different case. Khan and his spouse Bushra Bibi received a seven-year term on February 3 after a Rawalpindi court ruled that their 2018 marriage was illegal under Islamic law.
It’s unclear at this time if Qureshi will be permitted to leave custody.
Senior leader of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party Sayed Zulfiqar Bukhari claimed that the ruling of the Islamabad court demonstrated that the former prime minister’s legal issues were initially the result of fabricated cases.
“The court has now not only thrown this case aside, but also proven that it was yet another example of all the frivolous charges against former PM Khan and one by one, all such charges will soon come crumbling down,” he told Al Jazeera.
