The former cricketer has been embroiled in near constant legal battles since he was ousted from office in 2022.
Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi have been respectively sentenced to 14 and seven years in jail after being found guilty of corruption, officials and his lawyer said on Friday.
The couple are accused of being gifted land by property mogul Malik Riaz in exchange for laundered money during Khan’s premiership.
Prosecutors say Riaz was then allowed by Khan to pay fines that were imposed on him in another case from the same laundered money of 190 million British pounds ($240 million) that was returned to Pakistan by UK authorities in 2022 to deposit in the national exchequer.
The cricketer-turned-politician has consistently denied any and all wrongdoing, insisting that all the charges brought against him since his initial arrest in 2023 are a plot by political rivals to keep him out of power.
In a statement posted to social media platform X on Friday, Khan said: “I will never accept this dictatorship and I will stay in the prison cell for as long as I have to in the struggle against this dictatorship, but I will not compromise on my principles and the struggle for the true freedom of the nation.”
Following the verdict, Bibi, 50, was taken into custody by prison officers.
Bibi had previously served a prison sentence in another corruption case, known in Pakistan as a “graft case” until being freed on bail in October.
In November, Bibi, who was a faith healer before she married Khan and entered politics, led a rally to demand her husband’s release on the outskirts of the capital Islamabad.
Faisal Chaudhry, a defense lawyer, said the verdict could be challenged in the superior courts.
Shortly after the verdict was announced, politicians from Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Party (PTI) rallied outside the parliament, saying their leader had been wrongly sanctioned.
Omar Ayub Khan, a senior party leader who no relation of Imran Khan, said: “This is a bogus case, and we will approach an appeals court against this decision,” said
Some Khan supporters were also outside the Adiala prison in the city of Rawalpindi, just south of Islamabad, chanting anti-government slogans and demanding his release.
Khan, 72, was forced from power by a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April 2022 after falling out with Pakistan’s powerful military, and has been embroiled in legal battles ever since he was ousted.
The military, which has ruled Pakistan for most of its existence as an independent state since it was separated from India in 1947, says it is politically neutral.
Before this sentencing, he has previously been convicted on charges of corruption, revealing official secrets and violating marriage laws in three separate verdicts and sentenced to 10, 14 and seven years respectively.
However, Pakistani law stipulates that Khan will serve those terms concurrently, rather than consecutively, meaning the longest he is currently set to spend in prison is 14 years.
On Thursday, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar told reporters in the capital there was “irrefutable evidence” against Khan and Bibi in the “mega corruption scandal.”
Tarar added that the former prime minister didn’t even tell his own Cabinet about the funds that was returned by the UK to Pakistan’s coffers, and further alleged that Khan had built a massive house in the city of Lahore after his dealings with Riaz, and that he was unable to prove where he got the money from to fund the construction.
The latest development came a day after Khan’s party held a round of talks with representatives of the government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to demand the release of all political detainees, including their own and other party leaders.
Sharif became prime minister following the February 2024 election, which the PTI says was rigged.
Before Khan entered politics, he grew up the son of affluent parents in Lahore before going on to the University of Oxford in England, where he studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
He then became one of the most famous cricket players in the world, and was part of the Pakistan team which won the Cricket World Cup in 1992.
He founded the PTI Party in 1996, but it wasn’t until 2018 he became Pakistan’s 19th prime minister, holding the role for four years before he was ousted.
No Pakistani prime minister has ever held the office for the full five-year term provided for the role in the nation’s constitution.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.