Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, who has been in prison for more than two years, wrote a letter to the Chief Justice of Pakistan in September explaining the conditions in which he is imprisoned in a 9-foot by 11-foot “cage.”
“I have endured continued solitary confinement,” Khan wrote. “I was denied any access to books or newspapers.” He is 72 years old and has been sentenced to 14 years in prison. His letter can be seen as a plea for mercy, a recommendation for justice, and even a hint that any hope for legal reprieve is fading.
Millions of Khan’s supporters and members of his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) party believe the charges against him are fabricated and politically motivated. Strictly speaking, Mr. Khan’s imprisonment is the result of a complex intertwining of numerous legal cases. He was convicted in some cases and remains on trial in several others. Recently, a Lahore city court rejected his petition to consolidate the cases against him.
After a decade and a half of little progress in politics, Khan aligned himself and the PTI with the military in the early 2010s and eventually became prime minister in 2018. After sharing power for several years, Mr. Khan lost support from the military establishment and was removed from office following a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April 2022.
Mr. Khan has accused the military and the United States of orchestrating his ouster and led vigorous protests demanding immediate new elections. He was briefly arrested in May 2023, after which his supporters attacked Pakistan’s military headquarters in Rawalpindi and the homes of senior military officials in Lahore. Mr. Khan is accused of inciting these attacks.
Repression of his party continued. Most of the PTI leaders have been arrested or forced to resign. Hundreds of party members were imprisoned. Amnesty International has documented cases of “enforced disappearance” of family members of PTI leaders. More than 100 party members were arrested in July. Mr. Khan’s party has lost its strength and ability to protest in the streets, with most of its leaders in jail or leaving the party for safety.
Trials in Garrison City
Several Pakistani politicians who clashed with the military have been held in a prison in Rawalpindi, the garrison town where Pakistan’s military headquarters are located. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1973 to 1977, was ousted by military commander General Zia-ul-Haq, imprisoned, tried, and executed in Rawalpindi District Jail in 1979.
Fearing that the prison would become a monument to Bhutto, General Zia demolished it and a new prison complex, Adiala Prison, was built on the outskirts of the city. Imran Khan is being held in Adiala Prison. Before him, Pakistan’s other former prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, and Maryam Nawaz Sharif, chief minister of Pakistan’s Punjab province and niece of Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, were also held in the same prison.
The course of Imran Khan’s trial has been shaped by political considerations. The case against the former prime minister has not been tried in Pakistan’s regular civil courts. To prevent his supporters and the public from seeing the charismatic politician being transferred from prison to court, the government built a makeshift courtroom in Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail, where he is being tried.
In justifying the construction of a temporary courtroom to try Mr. Khan behind bars, judges at the Islamabad High Court cited a century-old precedent from the Bombay High Court in colonial India that ruled that trials could be held outside court in special circumstances, such as during a plague outbreak.
series of charges
Unraveling the charges against Khan is a difficult task. Almost 200 criminal cases were filed against Khan shortly after he was removed from office following a vote of no confidence in parliament in April 2022. Mr Khan’s wife Bushra Bibi has been named as an accomplice in several cases.
The charges cover a fairly broad legal spectrum, including theft of state gifts, land theft, illegal marriages of Muslims, leaking state secrets, and inciting violent attacks on military headquarters and facilities. So far, Mr. Khan has been acquitted of charges of leaking state secrets and of charges that the couple’s marriage was illegal under Islamic law.
Recently, the Bvlgari jewelry set incident was at the center of the Khan trial. The Saudi royal family gifted the Khans with Bvlgari necklaces, bracelets, earrings and rings during their tenure. The law requires the prime minister to record gifts from the state and deposit them in the national treasury.
In September, prosecutors presented Mr. Khan’s close aides and a gemologist as witnesses. They told the court that during Mr. Khan’s tenure, on instructions from Bushra Bibi, aides threatened to blacklist gemologists from government jobs and forced them to undervalue a Bvlgari jewelry set worth about $500,000 by $38,000.
Khan and his wife later paid $38,000 to the state treasury and were able to keep the Bvlgari jewelry set for themselves. Prosecutors accused Mr. Khan of similar fraud by storing the Bvlgari set and 107 other gifts from other countries.
Khan is not Pakistan’s first prime minister to face legal disgrace in connection with jewellery. In 2003, a Swiss court found that Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari received kickbacks from two Swiss companies for contracts awarded by the government in 1995. Switzerland paid $12 million in fees to two British Virgin Islands companies owned by Bhutto’s husband and brother-in-law. Bhutto bought the diamond necklace from a London jeweler, with part of the payment coming from the bank account of her husband’s British Virgin Islands company.
Khan has long denounced expropriation and personal greed. Sadly, the compromises of politics and the lure of power seem to have led him to join forces with questionable figures. One of the figures in his orbit was Malik Riaz, an established real estate billionaire with a reputation for bribing and influencing every politician and powerful figure in Pakistan.
Rias had a big problem. In March 2019, Bahria Town in Rias avoided prosecution in a land fraud case before the Supreme Court of Pakistan by agreeing to pay a $3 billion fine over seven years into an account controlled by the Supreme Court. After a down payment of about $160 million was made by August 2019, Riaz’s company had to pay a monthly penalty of $16 million. If the company fails to pay the two installments on time, it becomes insolvent.
Around the same time, British authorities closed a “dirty money” investigation into Rias, freezing his assets worth 190 million pounds (about $250 million), including a central London mansion and several bank accounts. In December 2019, Riaz reached a settlement with Britain’s National Crime Agency in which he handed over funds and assets to Pakistan, where he was charged with fraud and corruption.
Shortly after, a special assistant to Prime Minister Khan announced that 140 million pounds (approximately $183 million) of the funds recovered from Riaz had been returned to Pakistan. Prosecutors said Mr. Khan and his government ensured that the money owed to the state treasury was instead deposited into a bank account controlled by the Supreme Court and treated as payment for fines owed by Riaz’s company.
In return, prosecutors allege, he received billions of rupees and 20 hectares of land from Riaz through the Al-Qadir Trust, a foundation set up by the Khans. In January, Mr. Khan and his wife were found guilty in the Al Qadir Trust case. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison. She scored seven.
Munir’s Hegemony
Imran Khan is also facing a number of cases in Pakistan’s anti-terrorism courts. On May 9, 2023, after his initial brief arrest, a crowd of his supporters stormed the Pakistan military headquarters in Rawalpindi and attacked military installations and government property elsewhere in the country. Attacks on military headquarters by civilians are the kind of grave crimes that the military is unlikely to forgive, even with smart lawyers and persuasive legal arguments.
Charges have already been brought against Mr Khan in connection with the attack on the military headquarters. In May, Pakistan’s Supreme Court transferred jurisdiction to a military court while hearing his case. The court overturned an earlier ruling invalidating military trials of civilians and reinstated a controversial provision in the Pakistan Army Act allowing such trials. The ruling leaves little hope for legal redress for Mr. Khan and other Pakistanis in similar situations.
After a brief and dangerous conflict between India and Pakistan in May, the United States, China and Saudi Arabia renewed their support for Pakistan’s military, making the military’s leadership significantly stronger and more popular. Pakistan Army Commander General Syed Asim Munir has been awarded the rank of Field Marshal and enjoys wide public and political support.
The only way to release Khan from solitary confinement is extrajudicially, namely through an agreement with the military authorities.
Such a possibility is by no means out of the question in Pakistan. The fact that yet another former prime minister has come to a dead end in a legal battle to test his innocence suggests that Pakistan’s judicial system is becoming increasingly hollowed out and watered down.
The dungeon is about to engulf another Pakistani prime minister.
