By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad High Court (IHC) on Monday acquitted former Prime Minister Imran Khan and ex-Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi of charges related to leaking state secrets, their lawyer and party said.
The IHC Chief Justice Aamer Farooq and Justice Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb announced the short verdict after accepting the appeals of Khan and Qureshi against their convictions.
Khan was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a lower court in January for making public a classified cable sent by Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington in 2022. Qureshi was also acquitted of the same charges.
“Thank God, the sentence is overturned,” Naeem Panjutha, a member of for legal team of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, said on X.
The cipher case, as it is known, revolves around a diplomatic document that the Federal Investigation Agency alleges was never returned by Khan’s government. Khan has long maintained that the document contained a threat from the United States to topple his government.
The duo will remain in prison due to a separate conviction and ongoing cases. Khan, who was ousted in a parliamentary no-trust vote in April, has been in jail since last August after being convicted in multiple cases.
Khan’s counsel, Barrister Salman Safdar, said the state failed to prove its case, and the leaders did not engage in anti-state activities. “Hats off to the honourable judges. It was a case of first impression. Imran Khan and Shah Mahmood Qureshi did not do any anti-state activity,” Safdar said. “The high court declared today that there was no traitor here whose case was being heard. Whatever Imran Khan did was in the national interest.”
Khan’s party hailed the verdict as a “day of happiness” and called for their immediate release.
“The nation saw today that the just verdict came and the banner of justice was held high and that baseless case was eliminated in which Imran Khan spent around 10 months in jail and for which he was kept in jail all the time. Today is a day of happiness … very soon the nation will see that Imran Khan will be outside,” party leader Barrister Gohar Ali Khan told reporters.
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