Court acquits ex-PM Khan and wife in marriage case

A Pakistani court has overturned the conviction and seven-year prison sentence of former prime minister Imran Khan and his wife in the case of the couple’s alleged 2018 unlawful marriage case.

The decision removes the last known hurdle in the way of Khan’s release nearly a year after he was jailed, lawyers said.

Naeem Panjutha, one of Khan’s lawyers, said the court announced the verdict in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, where the former premier is being held.

The acquittal comes two weeks after another appeals court upheld the February 5 conviction and sentence of Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi.

The court in its brief order said if the couple is not wanted in any other case, they should be released.

Bibi is Khan’s third wife and a spiritual healer.

She was previously married to a man who claimed that they divorced in November 2017, less than three months before she married Khan. Islamic law, as upheld by Pakistan, requires a three-month waiting period before a new marriage.

Bibi has said they divorced in August 2017 and the couple insisted during the trial that they did not violate the waiting period.

It was unclear how the government would respond to the court order. Authorities have registered multiple cases against Khan since 2022 when he was ousted from power through a vote of no-confidence in the parliament.

The latest development came a day after Pakistan’s supreme court ruled that the party of Khan was improperly denied at least 20 seats in parliament, in a significant blow to the country’s fragile governing coalition.

Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party was previously excluded from a system that gives parties extra seats reserved for women and minorities in the National Assembly, or lower house of the parliament.

Though the verdict was a major political win for Khan, it would not put his party in a position to oust the government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who came into power following a February 8 election that Khan allies say was rigged.

Khan has been embroiled in more than 150 legal cases, including inciting violence, since his arrest in May 2023.

During nationwide riots that followed that, Khan’s supporters attacked the military and government buildings in various parts of the country and torched a building housing state-run Radio Pakistan in the north-west.

The violence subsided only when Khan was released by the supreme court. Khan was again arrested in early August 2023 after a court handed him a three-year jail sentence for corruption.

Since then, Khan has been given bail by different courts in all the cases in which he has been convicted.