An exercise bike and a prison cell: The trial of Imran Khan

Shahzad Akbar was at home with his wife and two daughters in Hertfordshire, north of London, two Sundays ago when the bell rang and there was a knock on the door.

As he opened it, a man produced a plastic vial and splashed him with acid.

“My glasses took most of it, so my face was somehow not much damaged … I washed it immediately,” he said. “But [the top of] my head ... it has all the [burn] markings and now the skin is peeling off.”

A human rights lawyer and top adviser to former Pakistani leader Imran Khan, Akbar’s left arm was badly burnt too. He could not identify the assailant, who wore winter clothing and a helmet and sped off on a motorcycle.

Imran Khan.Credit: Bloomberg

But he has no doubt that it was a targeted attack, the latest attempt to convince him to turn against his besieged old boss.

As Pakistan’s cricket team prepares to begin a Test series in Australia this week former World Cup-winning captain Khan, who famously held the trophy aloft at the MCG in 1992 before going on to become prime minister, is in prison in Rawalpindi, south of Islamabad.

Already jailed for three years over the illegal sale of state gifts, which he denies, he faces more than 150 charges that he and his supporters say are similarly trumped-up. Among the alleged offences are terrorism, blasphemy and revealing state secrets.

Pakistan descended into chaos this year as the repercussions of his April 2022 removal from power reverberated around the nuclear-armed nation of 250 million people bordering China and India.

The 71-year-old refused to go quietly, accusing Pakistan’s armed forces of orchestrating his downfall with the United States after a controversial visit to Russia, alleging leading regime figures were behind an attempt to assassinate him, and demanding the generals get out of politics.

Imran Khan holds up the World Cup after Pakistan defeated England at the MCG in 1992.Credit: Archive

Khan and his Pakistan-Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, whose symbol is a cricket bat, were elevated to government in 2018 with the backing of the military.

His public defiance after his ousting delivered soaring popularity ratings but has brought the wrath of the security establishment down upon him.

In a country where a prime minister has never seen out a full five-year term, Khan is not the first former leader to receive a prison sentence. His three-time predecessor and rival Nawaz Sharif was among a handful of others subjected to that fate. Former president and prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed in 1979 during one of Pakistan’s decades-long periods of direct military rule.

But amid a mass crackdown on Khan’s party following deadly riots in May, he refused to back off.

“There’s an undeclared martial law in Pakistan. There’s darkness ahead,” he told MSNBC in July. “We are standing on the edge of darkness.”

With a looming election that has now been pencilled in for February 8, Khan boomed to the BBC that Pakistan “has been taken over by fascists” frightened of the voting public.

Supporters of former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan’s party condemn a November shooting incident on their leader’s convoy in Karachi last year.Credit: AP

“The reason why I’m suffering is because they know that [in the] elections we would win hands down. And because of that, they’re dismantling a democracy,” he said.

Akbar, who left for Britain soon after Khan’s government fell last year, said it was not in the nature of the champion cricket all-rounder to bow down despite the stakes.

“It has been conveyed to me by the leadership in Pakistani military ... they say that ‘Imran Khan is our creation, that in politics we supported Imran Khan, that’s why he came into power. He did not dance to our tunes and now we are going to dismantle him completely and absolutely’,” Akbar said.

“The whole idea behind it is that they want to punish Imran for standing up against the military.

“Anyone who knows Imran knows he’s an alpha male, he’s a very strong-headed person and he would never take dictation from anyone.”

Sidelining

After falling out with the military, Khan was unseated by a parliamentary vote of no-confidence 18 months ago.

His exit came with Pakistan in the grip of an economic meltdown that continues, marked by soaring inflation and foreign debt and deepened by devastating floods last year that killed 1723 people and inflicted more than $US30 billion ($46 billion) in damage.

Khan had reportedly lost the backing of army chiefs over key appointments and his desire for a more balanced foreign policy. Having long challenged Pakistan’s need to be lockstep with the US, most notably in the war on terror, he pursued closer relations with Russia and China.

Lacklustre financial management and governance was also cited by his political adversaries as a factor in his sidelining.

“Khan and the PTI’s rise to power was integrally facilitated by the Pakistan Army. He lost power when he lost the countenance of [the] army,” said James Schwemlein, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank.

“There was no single factor – the loss of confidence occurred as a result of accumulated disagreements, which led the [army] chief and other senior leaders to perceive him as no longer reliable.

“The army is trying to engineer a political situation where it has control when it wants control, but can avoid accountability or responsibility over things that go wrong – whether or not that is the case.”

But Khan took aim at the military top brass and the Biden administration, telling crowds at rallies that a diplomatic cable from the Pakistan embassy in Washington showed the US wanted him deposed.

According to US news site The Intercept, which published contents of the secret message in August, a meeting between US Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu and the then-Pakistani ambassador held less than a fortnight after Khan visited Moscow on February 24, 2022, encouraged his dislodgement. Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the invasion of Ukraine on the day he was there.

Shahzad Akbar (right), pictured with Khan during his four years as prime minister.Credit:

“I think if the no-confidence vote against the prime minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the prime minister,” said Lu, according to The Intercept report.

“Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.”

Less than a month later, Khan was abandoned by coalition allies and his prime ministership was over.

The US admitted it had been concerned about his presence in Moscow but said suggestions it interfered in Pakistan’s domestic affairs had “always been false and they remain false”.

The Pakistani government and military likewise firmly shot down Khan’s claims of an American plot.

“A state of hysteria was created in the country on the pretext of a fake and false narrative,” Reuters reported then army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa as saying in November last year.

Akbar’s left arm and the top of his head were burnt in the acid attack at his home.

It was that month that Khan was shot in the leg while being paraded before devotees in an open-topped truck.

In another verbal broadside, he levelled responsibility at then prime minister Shehbaz Sharif, then interior minister Rana Sanaullah and an official with Pakistan’s feared spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Along with his suspicions of a foreign conspiracy to topple him, the allegations about who was behind the bid to assassinate him were dismissed as “highly irresponsible and baseless” by the military. They were similarly rejected by Sharif, who said there wasn’t a shred of evidence, and by Sanaullah, who branded them lies.

The military has also denied that the cavalcade of charges against Khan were politically motivated.

Sanaullah, however, offered an insight into the level of enmity between Khan and Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz party in March, saying: “We consider him as a political rival but he sees us as his sworn enemy. There can [be] a major disaster in the country if Imran Khan is not eliminated from politics. He has brought the nation’s politics to a point where only one of us can exist”.

Since then, that has all but taken place. Khan was disqualified from politics for five years, convicted in August for profiting from gifts such as watches that he had received while abroad on official duty.

In October, he was also indicted for exposing the existence of the diplomatic cable, and he is now on trial in a special in-prison court from which foreign media has been barred. If found guilty of violating the Official Secrets Act, he could be sentenced to up to 14 years behind bars or even the death penalty.

Speaking from Britain, Akbar said he would be surprised if the US had played an active role in Khan being forced out, but he believes the timing of his trip to Russia was used against him.

The visit was the first by a Pakistan prime minister in almost a quarter of a century and according to Khan’s former aide was designed for trade purposes, principally to seal a deal on natural gas as the country confronted an energy crisis.

It was planned well in advance of Putin’s attack on Ukraine, he said.

“[It] was not a unilateral decision of the prime minister,” Akbar said. “It basically involved the foreign office and the military ... everyone was on board for that visit.”

‘This is a new low in our history’

Khan’s initial arrest at the Islamabad High Court on May 9 triggered nationwide protests that turned violent when anti-government demonstrators set upon military facilities, torching and vandalising vehicles and buildings including the army headquarters in Rawalpindi and the home of an army commander in Lahore. There were at least eight deaths in the ensuing clashes.

Culpability for inciting the uprising – cast as Pakistan’s September 11 by one minister – was directed squarely at Khan and his PTI party.

Angry Khan supporters set fires during a protest against his arrest on May 9.Credit: AP

Television networks were banned from reporting on his speeches or even news related to him.

Dozens of party leaders were detained and more than 10,000 of its workers arrested, according to the former leader. While PTI has claimed senior party figures have been tortured in jail, others were released and announced they were severing links with him.

According to Akbar, it has not been by choice.

“It has become regular practice that former members of parliament ... and also former cabinet ministers ... are picked up, they go missing,” said Akbar, who oversaw anti-corruption and interior affairs in Khan’s government and also became a member of his cabinet.

“And then they appear, depending on how soon that person breaks, starting from one month to multiple months, and they will basically give a statement saying that they are leaving the party or leaving politics. We had this phenomenon called forced marriages. Now we have forced conversion or defection.”

From some people, he said, the demand was not only to leave the party, but to testify against Khan in one of his legal cases.

A vocal critic of the government and security apparatus in Pakistan, Akbar has refused to buckle himself, despite having his own brother Murad abducted from his house in Islamabad in June in a ploy to have him return to Pakistan.

A Khan supporter is detained by police in Lahore in May.Credit: AP

Murad was only freed in August after British resident Akbar sought the help of his local MP and filed a criminal complaint in Britain against Pakistani officials, saying his brother had been kidnapped to blackmail him.

“Beating you up, picking up your family members, going after your women. The sanctity of family ... people pay a lot of value to that,” he said. “Your four walls were never broken by the army like this, the way they’re doing now. So this is new, this is a new low in our history.”

Contact was sought from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations, the military’s media department.

In Hertfordshire, Khan’s ex-adviser had been careful to keep his address hidden since, but he realised that was no longer the case last month when an otherwise innocuous envelope from the Pakistan High Commission in London turned up in his letterbox.

He considered it a warning that “we know where you live”. In the weeks afterwards came the acid attack on his doorstep.

Back in Pakistan, the efforts to discredit Khan have only intensified, encompassing his personal life.

A fortnight ago the ex-husband of Khan’s current wife, Bushra Bibi, accused him of ruining their marriage. He petitioned a court to rule that Khan’s own nuptials with Bibi were “un-Islamic” because they wedded in 2018 within the so-called waiting period of three months following her divorce.

“Despite all this they’re not able to dismantle Imran Khan,” Akbar said. “They put him in prison thinking that he will break down.

“When Nawaz Sharif went to prison he demanded all sorts of luxuries. Imran has only demanded one luxury and that was an exercise machine.

“He’s addicted to only one thing and that’s exercising three hours a day. Even as prime minister, the only thing that he missed was that he could not exercise for three hours, but he would still manage about an hour and a half or something every day.”

As he continues to stare down the establishment, Nawaz Sharif has returned from four years in self-exile, a corruption conviction overturned and jail term forgotten, and is being positioned for yet another run as prime minister.

As grim as his predicament appears, the vengeful cycle of politics in Pakistan in the 15 years since the resignation of coup-leading army chief and president Pervez Musharraf suggests it may not be the last of Khan either.

“Virtually every PM that has assumed office since Musharraf left power has been detained, charged, investigated etc. And on the other end of the process, charges can be withdrawn or dismissed [and] pre-trial detention can be terminated through negotiated term,” Schwemlein said.

“I can’t speak to whether or not the specific claims against Khan are founded or not. The evidence isn’t really out there. But I doubt that his political career is over.”

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