A Pakistan court acquitted former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife on Saturday on charges of unlawful marriage, his lawyer said, though he remains jailed over allegations of inciting riots.
Naeem Panjutha said the court announced the ruling in garrison city of Rawalpini.
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Khan, 71, and his wife, Bushra Khan, also known as Bushra Bibi, were sentenced to seven years in February when a court found them guilty of breaking Islamic law by failing to observe the required interval between Bibi’s divorce from a previous marriage and her marriage to Khan.
It can be recalled that a district and sessions court in Islamabad on June 27 declined the pleas of the former Prime Minister and his wife Bushra Bibi to suspend their seven-year sentences in the Iddat case, Dawn reported.
Prior to the general elections, on February 3, an Islamabad court sentenced the couple to seven years in prison and fined them each 500,000 Pakistani rupees for getting married during Bushra Bibi’s Iddat period — a specified period of time that must elapse before a Muslim widow or divorcee may remarry.
The couple was also given 14 years in prison in the Toshakhana case, while Khan and his foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, were given 10 years in prison in the cipher case, the same week the verdict was rendered.
Khan and Qureshi were found not guilty in the cipher case earlier last month, and the penalties in the Toshakhana case were suspended in April.