Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan, gestures as he speaks to the members of the media at his residence in Lahore, Pakistan May 18, 2023.
Mohsin Raza | Reuters
Former Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan has been sentenced to ten years in jail on charges of leaking state secrets, his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) confirmed in a post on social media site X on Tuesday.
Khan and his supporters have decried the charges as politically motivated.
“There can be no more ridiculous case than the Cipher. What can be more ridiculous than that Pakistan has imprisoned its Prime Minister and Foreign Minister for exposing the foreign conspiracy!!,” PTI, which is Pakistan’s largest political party, wrote on X.
Cipher refers to the name of the case in which both Khan and former Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi have been sentenced to a decade behind bars, and centers on secret diplomatic communications between Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S. and Islamabad that were allegedly leaked while Khan was prime minister.
The former national cricket captain became Pakistan’s prime minister in 2018. Now 71-years-old, Khan was removed from office by political opponents in 2022, and later arrested in May of 2023 and has been serving a three-year jail term on a corruption conviction.
This is a breaking news story, please check back later for more.
This story originally appeared on CNBC
