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Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has been sentenced to a further 14 years in prison after being found guilty of corruption. The already-imprisoned politician and his wife are accused of accepting a gift of land from a real estate tycoon in exchange for laundered money when Khan was in power.

Khan’s wife has also been sentenced to seven years in jail after being found guilty. Prosecutors say the tycoon, Malik Riaz, was allowed by Khan to pay fines that were imposed on him in another case from the same laundered money of 190 million British pounds that was returned to Pakistan by British authorities in 2022 to deposit to the national exchequer.

Khan has denied wrongdoing and insisted since his arrest in 2023 that all the charges against him are a plot by rivals to keep him from returning to office. Khan, who was ousted in a no-confidence vote in parliament in April 2022, had 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.

Under Pakistani law, he is to serve the terms concurrently – meaning, the length of the longest of the sentences. The former cricket star enjoyed popular support when he became premier in 2018 but fell out with the king-making military establishment and was booted from power in a 2022 no-confidence vote.

He then waged a risky and unprecedented campaign of defiance against the top brass before swiftly becoming embroiled in a legal saga in which he has been accused of wrongdoing in around 200 cases. Khan says the charges have been trumped up to prevent his comeback and his battle in the courts has become the nation’s defining political drama, spurring mass protests and unrest. The 72-year-old’s sentencing on Friday is among his biggest setbacks since he was first jailed in August 2023. His wife and spiritual guide Bushra Bibi was convicted alongside him.

However, Pakistan’s politics frequently see leaders return to high office after serving time in jail and, as a former national cricket captain, Khan has delivered victory in the face of seemingly impossible odds before. ‘A cricket captain, to be leader, has to lead by example – he has to show courage if he wants his team to fight,’ Khan wrote in his 2011 memoir. ‘In times of crisis, he must have the ability to take the pressure.’ Khan was voted in by millions of Pakistanis who grew up watching him play cricket, where he excelled as an all-rounder and led the nation to a World Cup victory in 1992.

He ended decades of political dominance by dynastic parties and envisioned a national welfare state modelled on the Islamic golden age of the seventh to 14th centuries, a flourishing period in the Muslim world. But his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party made little headway improving the country’s finances, with galloping inflation, crippling debt and a feeble rupee undermining economic reform. Many prominent opposition figures were jailed during his tenure and rights groups decried a crackdown on media freedoms, with TV channels unofficially barred from airing his opponents’ views.

With the tables now turned, he faces many of those same curbs alongside his wife Bibi – a reclusive faith healer who married Khan shortly before he was elected. Khan was shot and wounded in a November 2022 assassination bid he accused top military officers of plotting, crossing what analysts say was a red line in a country ruled by generals for decades.

His first short-lived arrest the following May sparked nationwide unrest, some of which targeted military facilities and which sparked a widespread crackdown against PTI. Khan was barred from standing in February 2024 elections and was hit by a trio of fresh convictions just days before a poll marred by rigging allegations.

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