Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) founder and former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi have been sentenced to seven years in prison each in the ‘non-Islamic marriage’ case.
Imran Khan and Bushra Bibi were sentenced to seven years in jail and fined by a court on Saturday, their party said.
The court held that the law was violated during their 2018 marriage.
This is Imran Khan’s third marriage to Bushra Bibi. But now the court accepted that Islamic traditions were violated in the marriage.
According to ‘The Express Tribune’ newspaper, Islamabad High Court (IHC) Chief Justice Aamir Farooq heard the petition filed by Bushra Bibi’s ex-husband Khawar Maneka in November last year.
After completion of the hearing, the court had reserved its decision on the petition on Wednesday.
What is the whole matter?
Bushra Bibi’s ex-husband Maneka, in his petition, had requested to take legal action regarding 71-year-old Imran Khan’s marriage with Bushra Bibi.
He claimed that Bushra Bibi had married during the period of ‘Iddat’. Under Islam, a woman cannot remarry for three months after divorce or death of her husband and this period is called ‘Iddat period’.
Imran Khan’s lawyer Salman Akram Raja had said during the hearing on Wednesday that the purpose of the petition is only to humiliate the plaintiffs in the case (Khan and Bushra).
He said that the complaint against Imran Khan’s marriage was filed in November 2023, five years and 11 months after the marriage.
According to the news, Maneka’s lawyer told the court that witnesses had testified in the lower court that Bushra Bibi was married to Khan when she had her second marriage, after which the court framed charges against both of them.
49 year old Bushra Bibi belongs to the landlord family of Punjab. His first marriage was to Maneka which lasted for about 30 years. Maneka also belongs to a politically influential family of Punjab.
This was the third court decision against Imran this week. Earlier, an accountability court had sentenced Imran Khan and his wife Bibi to 14 years of rigorous imprisonment in a corruption case related to Toshakhana.
In the Toshakhana corruption case, Khan is accused of possessing expensive government gifts received during his tenure as Prime Minister of Pakistan.
Apart from this, Imran Khan and former Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi were sentenced to 10 years in prison for disclosing sensitive government secrets.