“I will step down once the conviction of Imran Khan is overturned,” he said.
Gohar Khan is a lawyer of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, the country’s top judicial body, according to his website; He graduated from Wolverhampton University in the UK and is currently part of Imran Khan’s legal defense team.
A senior PTI leader, Omar Ayub Khan, said that the former premier set a precedent by nominating a party member as his successor rather than a relative, a common practice in Pakistan’s political circles. “He set an impossibly high bar,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Last month, the Election Commission of Pakistan gave PTI 20 days to choose a leader after annulling the party election of last year, when Imran Khan was renewed as head.
Imran Khan, the former cricketer who became one of the country’s most popular politicians, was convicted in August for unlawfully selling state gifts and was unable to run in his party’s election.
He was ousted in a no-confidence vote in parliament in 2022 and has since been mired in legal battles over corruption charges and revealing state secrets among others.
Khan had denied all charges and depicted his ouster as part of a campaign against him by then Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, the United States and the Pakistani military – a claim all three deny.
Source: CNA
