A district and sessions court has declared a petition against PTI chief Imran Khan’s marriage with Bushra Bibi as inadmissible for hearing.

Civil judge Nasr Minallah, who presided over the petition seeking legal action against the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf chairman for marrying his present wife while she was reportedly on Iddat, announced the reserved decision.

Iddat is a 130-day wai­ting period, or a period of abstinence, after the dissolution of a woman’s marriage through di­­vorce, death, or any other form of separation from her husband, during which the woman remains unmarried. Khan married Bushra, his third wife, in Feb 2018.

At the hearing, the petitioner’s lawyer Raja Rizwan Abbasi said that marriage during iddat was illegal. “It is a fraud to say that if you get married on the first day of 2018, you will become the PM,” he said.

On the last hearing, Mufti Saeed, the cleric who performed the Nikkah, recalled that the former premier contacted him again the following month, Feb 2018, with a request to perform the Nikkah with Bushra Bibi afresh as the first one was against the principles of Shariah.

“I was told that the Nikah was solemnised during Bushra Bibi’s Iddat as she had been divorced in Nov 2017. But there was a ‘prediction’ that the PTI chairman will become prime minister if he marries Bushra on Jan 1, 2018,” the cleric said in his testimony.

The petitioner’s lawyer said that in January 2018, Bushra Bibi was in Iddat and she divorced her husband in November. “If the marriage was legal then why [they] remarried, the fraud started from Bani Gala and the marriage took place in Lahore,” he added.

The judge asked that Khan’s marriage took place in Lahore and wondered how does the court have jurisdiction? Lawyer Abbasi replied that the cleric who performed the Nikkah was also taken from Islamabad for Nikkah.

“In February 2018, the Nikkah of Khan and Bushra Bibi was again performed in Islamabad,” he said. The court reserved its decision after the completion of the arguments.

Later, the court declared the petition inadmissible for hearing. The matter of marriage during Iddat is beyond the jurisdiction of the court, the court remarked.