The Islamabad High Court on Friday has issued a notice to the National Accountability Bureau regarding bail petitions filed by former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, in the new Toshakhana case.
Following their acquittal in the iddat case, Imran Khan and Bushra Bibi were taken into custody. They have filed a petition asserting that their remand into NAB’s custody was illegal, infringing on their fundamental rights to liberty.
Initially, a division bench comprising IHC Chief Justice Amir Farooq and Justice Saman Rafat Imtiaz reviewed the couple’s petition on July 25. However, Imran Khan’s lawyer requested that Chief Justice Farooq recuse himself from the case, citing a complaint Khan had lodged against him with the Supreme Judicial Council. The lawyer sought the transfer of the case to another bench.
Despite rejecting the recusal request, Chief Justice Farooq had to form a new bench because Justice Imtiaz went on summer vacation, leading to the dissolution of the previous bench. The case has now been assigned to a new division bench comprising Justices Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb and Arbab Muhammad Tahir.
Meanwhile, Lahore High Court’s (LHC) Justice Syed Shahbaz Ali Rizvi overruled an objection to Bushra Bibi’s petition against her arrest in a separate Toshakhana case. The judge removed the registrar’s office’s objection regarding the petition’s maintainability and ordered it to be scheduled for a hearing. Bushra Bibi filed the petition through Advocate Sardar Latif Khosa, stating that she and her husband were granted bail in the Toshakhana case but were re-arrested maliciously in a new case.
The petition claimed that female officials assaulted and humiliated Bushra Bibi during her arrest at Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail, that she was arrested without a warrant from NAB, and that her imprisonment was an act of political victimization. The petition requested that the court take action against the jail superintendent and the female officials involved in the alleged assault and declare Bushra Bibi’s arrest illegal.
Imran Khan, 71, who served as Pakistan’s Prime Minister from 2018 to 2022, has been incarcerated in Adiala Jail since August 2023 on multiple charges, including the Toshakhana case, the cypher case, and the unlawful marriage case. His wife has also been in prison for several months.
A court suspended Imran Khan’s sentence in the Toshakhana case, and other courts overturned his convictions in the cypher and iddat cases. However, their hopes for release were dashed when NAB arrested them on new charges related to the sale of state gifts. Imran Khan’s chances of release were further diminished following his arrest in new cases related to the May 9, 2023 riots after his acquittal in the iddat case. Protests erupted across Pakistan on May 9, 2023, as PTI workers expressed their anger over Imran Khan’s arrest, leading to demonstrations in both remote and major cities.
