Pakistan's ex-prime minister Khan charged with betrayal of secrets

Pakistan's former Prime Minister Imran Khan has been indicted in one case for leaking classified documents. Khan, who is in custody, had wanted to use the document to prove that the United States was behind his dismissal.

A special court in Pakistan formally indicted former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his then-foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi on Monday for violating state secrets.

The case involves a coded diplomatic message that Khan cites as evidence that his removal as head of government is the result of a conspiracy involving the US and the Pakistani military. The U.S. and Pakistan's powerful military deny Khan's allegations.

The current indictment is that Khan decrypted the encrypted diplomatic message, which was classified as confidential, with the help of the necessary cipher and made it public.

According to Pakistani media reports, other people, including Khan's aide-de-camp Muhammad Azam Khan and former federal minister Asad Umar, may also be charged as part of the ongoing investigation.

The encrypted diplomatic message was sent by Pakistan's then-ambassador to the U.S., Asad Majeed Khan, after his meeting with two senior U.S. State Department officials in March 2022. Among those present was Donald Lu, the deputy undersecretary of the U.S. Office of South and Central Asian Affairs at the U.S. State Department.

Did Khan have to leave because of stance on Russia?

Various media outlets, including The Intercept, reported that Lu had criticized Imran Khan for his "aggressively neutral stance" in the Ukraine conflict, which escalated in late February of that year. Unlike the United States and its European allies, the Pakistani prime minister did not side with Kiev at the time.

Instead, he paid a pre-planned visit to Moscow, declaring at a rally that Pakistanis were not "slaves" of Washington, defying criticism from the West.

Lu reportedly discussed the no-confidence vote that Khan was already facing in parliament at the time. If the no-confidence vote is successful, "one will ... in Washington," Lu was quoted as saying, while Islamabad would supposedly be "isolated" in Pakistan if Khan remained in power.

The U.S. government denied that anything Lu said during that meeting amounted to influencing Pakistan's balance of power.

However, Khan was deposed about a month after that meeting and has since faced various charges, including some related to alleged terrorism and corruption. He himself has now declared that his political opponents would try to exclude him from the upcoming parliamentary elections in Pakistan with Washington's blessing. After Khan's fall, there was indeed a period of thaw in relations between the US and Pakistan. Islamabad received an unexpected windfall in July this year when the International Monetary Fund granted the country a $3 billion bailout.

The Intercept claimed that the U.S. supported the bailout in exchange for Pakistan's agreement to supply $900 million worth of ammunition to Ukraine. The Pakistani government has denied that this arms sale ever took place.