Former PM Imran Khan again under arrest for alleged involvement in political violence

13 Jul. (EUROPA PRESS) –

Pakistan’s former prime minister and opposition leader Imran Khan is back under arrest on Saturday, just hours after a court ordered his release on a continuation order in the so-called Toshakhana case, which linked the former president to selling gifts from various foreign dignitaries for personal enrichment.

After a year in jail, Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi heard on Saturday how a court upheld their appeal in the iddat case. It was based on a complaint by Bushra Bibi’s ex-husband, Jawar Farid Maneka, who claimed that she had married Khan during the iddat period, the three-month period that a woman has to go through after a divorce or widowhood before having a relationship or marriage with another man. It was, until now, the latest case for which they were imprisoned.

However, before the couple left Adiala Jail (Rawalpindi), a team from the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) arrived at the jail to re-arrest Jan and his wife in a new episode of the Toshakhana case, one of the first for which he was found guilty.

After a court suspended the conviction in this case, the former president appeared to have overcome this obstacle as well as the one presented by another case, the Ciphergate case, which stems from Jan’s decision to present a document during a public event in March 2022 claiming that it was a diplomatic cable from a foreign country — a veiled reference to the United States — that had conspired to remove him from power. Jan was also acquitted.

However, the reopening of what Pakistani media informally describe as Toshkana 2 is accompanied by an investigation into his alleged involvement in the wave of political violence unleashed after his arrest in May last year, which the country’s prosecutor’s office considers a terrorist crime.

The violence was carried out by his supporters, who in turn denounced police persecution, during protests against Khan’s arrest in May 2023. An anti-terrorism court in Lahore, the former president’s stronghold, rejected Khan’s bail on Tuesday in three cases related to his role in the unrest.

The court on Thursday became the first court to describe what happened on May 9 as a “conspiracy” by Khan and other senior members of the former president’s party, the Pakistan Movement for Justice or PTI, “against the Pakistani state.”