A Pakistani court on October 27 rejected petitions by jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan seeking bail and cancellation of the first FIR in the cipher case for allegedly leaking state secrets and violating the laws of the country.
| Photo Credit: AP

A Pakistani court on October 27 rejected petitions by jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan seeking bail and cancellation of the first FIR in the cipher case for allegedly leaking state secrets and violating the laws of the country.

Mr. Khan, 71, was arrested in August after a case was filed against him for disclosing a secret diplomatic cable (cipher) sent by the country’s embassy in Washington in March last year. A special court in Pakistan on October 23 indicted him along with his close ally ex-Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi in the case.

Mr. Khan, the chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, had approached the Islamabad High Court (IHC) with the pleas for bail in the case as well as against the FIR which was registered by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) in August.

IHC Chief Justice Aamer Farooq after the conclusion of the hearing had reserved judgment on October 16 which he announced on Friday.

The case is about a document sent by Pakistan’s embassy in Washington in March 2022 that Mr. Khan tried to use for political purposes by saying that it was proof of a foreign conspiracy to orchestrate his ouster from power in April last year.

Mr. Khan, who served as Prime Minister of Pakistan from August 2018 to April 2022, is accused of “misuse the contents of the cipher” to build a narrative that his government was ousted due to a foreign conspiracy hatched by the U.S., a charge denied by Washington.

Mr. Khan and Mr. Qureshi have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on September 30 presented the charge sheet against Mr. Khan and Mr. Qureshi who signed its copies.

On October 26, the Islamabad High Court rejected Mr. Khan’s petition challenging his indictment in the case.

The court was earlier set to indict Mr. Khan on October 17, but it delayed it after Mr. Khan’s lawyers objected that he was not provided with the copies of the chargesheet.

The cipher reportedly went missing from Mr. Khan’s possession. Mr. Khan had repeatedly said before and after the no-confidence motion against him last year that the cipher pointed to a conspiracy to remove him from the Prime Minister’s office.

Mr. Khan was ousted through a vote of no-confidence in April 2022. He was incarcerated on August 5 this year, after an Islamabad court sentenced him to three years in prison in the Toshakhana case. The PTI chief was lodged in the Attock District Jail to serve his prison term.

Later, his sentence was suspended by the Islamabad High Court, but then he was arrested in the cipher case and remained in the Attock jail on judicial remand. He was later shifted to Adiala jail.

More than 150 cases have been registered against Mr. Khan since his ouster from power in April last year.

Lahore:

A Pakistani court on Saturday raised an objection on a petition to reopen the case of Independence movement hero Bhagat Singh’s sentencing in 1931. The petition sought the setting aside of the sentencing by exercising the principles of review, and honouring the freedom fighter with posthumous state awards.

Singh was hanged by the British on March 23, 1931, along with his comrades Rajguru and Sukhdev, after being tried under charges of hatching a conspiracy against the British regime.

Singh was initially jailed for life but was later sentenced to death in another “fabricated case”.

On Saturday, the Lahore High Court (LHC) raised an objection to reopening the decade-old case and constitution of a larger bench to listen to the petition that pleads to set aside the sentence of Singh by exercising principles of review and ordering the government to honour him with posthumous state awards.

“The Lahore High Court on Saturday raised an objection to reopen the Bhagat Singh case and constitution of a larger bench for its early hearing. The court objected that the petition is not maintainable for the constitution of a larger bench,” Advocate Imtiaz Rashid Qureshi, chairman of the Bhagat Singh Memorial Foundation and one of the petitioners, told PTI.

Mr Qureshi said that the petition of a panel of senior lawyers, of which he is part, has been pending in the LHC for a decade.

“Justice Shujaat Ali Khan in 2013 had referred the matter to the chief justice for the constitution of a larger bench, since then it has been pending,” he said.

The petition says that Bhagat Singh fought for the independence of the sub-continent.

It states that Singh is respected in the subcontinent not only by the Sikhs, and Hindus but also Muslims. The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had paid tribute to him twice during his speech in the Central Assembly.

“It is a matter of national importance and should be fixed before a full bench,” Mr Qureshi pleaded.

He said Singh’s name was not mentioned in the First Information Report of the murder of British police officer John P Saunders for which he was sentenced to death.

About a decade ago, the Lahore police had searched through the records of the Anarkali police station on the court’s order and managed to find the FIR of the murder of Saunders.

Written in Urdu, the FIR was registered with the Anarkali police station on December 17, 1928, at 4.30 pm against two ‘unknown gunmen’.

The case was registered under sections 302, 120 and 109 of the Indian Penal Code.

Mr Qureshi said that the special judges of the tribunal handling Bhagat Singh’s case sentenced him to death without hearing 450 witnesses in the case.

Singh’s lawyers were not given the opportunity to cross-question them, he said.

“We will establish Bhagat Singh’s innocence in the Saunders case,” Mr Qureshi said. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)