Pakistan’s Imran Khan will face contempt charges in August, his lawyer says

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ISLAMABAD – Pakistan’s election watchdog said Tuesday it would indict the country’s former prime minister Imran Khan next week on charges of publicly insulting the country’s officials last year.

Khan appeared before a special court of the Election Commission of Pakistan with his lawyers under tight security in the capital Islamabad.

After a brief hearing, Shoaib Shaheen, one of Khan’s lawyers, said the court decided to charge the former prime minister with contempt on 2 August.

Khan is accused of calling the head of the electoral body, Sikandar Sultan Rajaa, and several of its officials personal servants of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif at several gatherings. Sharif replaced Khan in April 2022 after he was removed from power in a no-confidence vote in parliament.

Khan had avoided appearing before the court for the past several months, saying the electoral body has no authority to charge him with contempt.

On Monday, the election watchdog ordered Khan’s arrest after he repeatedly failed to appear before its court to face contempt charges over his public outbursts against Election Commission officials.

Khan was not arrested and appeared in court on his own accord on Tuesday.

Since his ouster, Khan has faced more than 150 trials, including multiple charges of corruption, terrorism and incitement to violence, over deadly protests in May in which his supporters attacked government and military property across the country.

Violence erupted across Pakistan in May when police arrested Khan in a graft case from an Islamabad courtroom. Khan, a cricket star turned Islamist politician, still has a large grassroots following in Pakistan. The days of rioting by his followers subsided only after Khan was released on the orders of the Supreme Court.

Since then, several other courts have also granted Khan protection from arrest in several cases.

Khan also appeared before the country’s Federal Investigation Agency on Tuesday to face charges of leaking a secret document. Last week, Sharif’s government said it would charge Khan with “disclosing an official secret document” last year when he brandished a classified diplomatic letter at a meeting, describing it as evidence he was under threat and claiming his ouster was a conspiracy.

The document, called Cipher, has not been made public, but was apparently diplomatic correspondence between a Pakistani ambassador in Washington and the foreign ministry in Islamabad.

Khan claims his ouster was part of a US plot, a claim rejected by Sharif and Washington.

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