ISLAMABAD – A Pakistan court handed former prime minister Imran Khan a 10-year jail term on Jan 30 for leaking state secrets, the former premier’s media team said.

The case pertains to allegations that Khan shared contents of a secret cable sent by Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington to the government in Islamabad.

Khan’s party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), said both their leader and former foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi were sentenced to 10 years each by a special court.

The party said it would challenge the decision and called it a “sham case”.

“We don’t accept this illegal decision,” Khan’s lawyer, Mr Naeem Panjutha, posted on social media platform X.

Khan aide Zulfikar Bukhari told Reuters the legal team was given no chance to represent the former prime minister or cross-examine witnesses, adding that the proceedings were carried out in jail.

He called the conviction an attempt to weaken support for Khan. “People will now make sure they come out and vote in larger numbers,” he told Reuters.

It is the second conviction for the embattled former cricket star in recent months. He was previously sentenced to three years in a graft case. While his jail term was suspended as he challenged the corruption conviction, it had already ruled him out of the general election next week.

Despite being ruled out of the election, Khan’s legal team was hoping to get him released from jail, where he has been since August, away from the public eye.

The party of three-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif, Khan’s main political opponent, said the verdict was not harsh enough. “I think, based on his carelessness and crime – pertaining to important national interests – this is a very light sentence,” Sharif aide Ahsan Iqbal said in a television interview.

The latest conviction means Khan’s release is unlikely, even as the charges are contested in a higher court.

Khan has been fighting dozens of court cases since he was ousted from power in a parliamentary vote of no confidence in 2022. He says the cable was proof of a conspiracy by the Pakistani military and Washington to topple his government in 2022 after he visited Moscow just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Washington and the Pakistani military deny the accusations.

Khan has previously said the contents of the cable appeared in the media from other sources.

The PTI, which won the 2018 elections, suffered a major setback earlier in January when a court upheld the Election Commission’s decision to strip the party of its traditional election symbol, the cricket bat.

PTI candidates are now contesting as independents, many of them on the run amid what the party calls a crackdown backed by the country’s powerful military. The military denies this.

Khan’s media team posted a message from the jailed leader on X in the moments leading up to the verdict. It said: “These people want to provoke you by giving me a harsh sentence in this case so that you go out on the streets and protest, then add unknown people to the crowd and then do another false flag operation.”

In May 2023, when Khan was arrested for the first time, his supporters were accused of rioting and ransacking military installations, including a high-ranking general’s home. Khan denies his supporters were part of the mob.

He called on his supporters to make sure they came out in numbers to vote for candidates backed by him.

“This is your war and this is your test that you have to take revenge for every injustice by your vote on Feb 8 while remaining peaceful,” the post added. REUTERS