‘Imran Khan barred from holding meetings inside Adiala jail for 2 weeks’

Islamabad: Jailed former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan has been barred from holding meetings inside Rawalpindi’s Adiala jail for two weeks, a media report said on Tuesday.

The development comes as 71-year-old Khan, who was moved to the Adiala jail in September 2023 from Attock jail, is serving an accumulative sentence of 31 years in various cases and has been engaging his lawyers, party leaders and family members during his imprisonment.

Previously the authorities had allocated Mondays and Thursdays as meeting days for the founder of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party.

Former cricketer-turned-politician Khan has been barred from holdings meetings inside Rawalpindi’s Adiala jail for two weeks, Geo News reported citing sources on Tuesday.

The ex-prime minister, along with former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, was handed down a sentence of 10 years each in the cipher case in January for publishing contents of a secret cable sent by the country’s ambassador in Washington to the government in Islamabad.

The cipher case pertains to a piece of paper, purported to be a diplomatic cable -- the cipher -- that Khan had waved at a public rally on March 27, 2022, and naming the US, had claimed that it was evidence’ of an “international conspiracy” to topple his government.

The Federal Investigation Agency filed the case against Khan and Qureshi on August 15 last year, which accused both of violating the secrecy laws while

handling the cable sent by the Pakistan embassy in Washington in March 2022.

Khan and Qureshi have also been barred from politics for five years.

This was followed by another 14-year sentence awarded to Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, by an accountability court in the Toshakhana reference for misusing his 2018 to 2022 premiership to buy and sell gifts in state possession that were received during visits abroad and worth more than Rs140 million ($635,000).

The court also handed down a fine of Rs1.57 billion Rs787 million each to the couple. Subsequently, Khan and Bushra were also sentenced to another seven years.