A British member of Parliament has been expelled from the Conservative Party on Monday after he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy in 2008.
Imran Ahmad Khan, the 48-year-old MP of Wakefield, northern England, was found guilty by a jury at Southwark Crown Court on Monday after around five hours of deliberation.
The judge, Mr. Justice Baker, released Khan on bail, and said he will sentence Khan “in due course.”
The judge added that the court was considering “all sentencing options, including immediate custody.”
Rosemary Ainslie, interim head of the Special Crime Division at the Crown Prosecution Service, said she was “pleased” that the jury had “accepted the victim’s compelling evidence about the offence committed by Khan.”
Janes Solicitors, the firm representing Khan, said their client “maintains his innocence and will be appealing as soon as possible.”
Following the verdict, a Conservative Party spokesman said Khan, who had been suspended since June 2021 after he was charged, was “expelled with immediate effect.”
If Khan is sentenced to more than a year in prison, he will automatically be disqualified from being an MP, triggering a by-election. He will otherwise remain an MP unless he resigns or is recalled by voters.
During the trial, the jury heard that Khan had forced the teenager to drink gin and tonic, dragged him upstairs, pushed him onto a bed, and asked him to watch pornography before groping him at a house in Staffordshire in January 2008.
The victim, now 29, told the jury he was left feeling “scared, vulnerable, numb, shocked, and surprised” after the attack.
A police report was made at the time, but the victim didn’t pursue the case.
He told jurors “it all came flooding back” when he learned Khan was standing in the December 2019 general election.
The victim said he contacted the Conservative Party press office about the attack after hearing the news but “wasn’t taken very seriously.”
A Conservative Party spokesperson said “no record of this complaint” had been found.
Days after Khan was elected, the victim made a complaint to the police.
Denying the allegations during the trial, Khan told the court on April 6 that he was “trying to be kind and helpful” by discussing sexuality with the boy, who he said appeared “troubled” and “keen to want to talk about this.”
Khan said the teenager became “very upset” and “bolted out” after he suggested pornography, and that he touched the teenager’s “elbow or his arm to placate him.”
In March, prosecutor Sean Larkin QC told the court that the victim’s older brother was at the same party wearing a kilt. He said Khan lifted up the kilt while asking if the then-18-year-old was wearing the garment like “a true Scotsman.”
The court has also heard from a witness who alleged that Khan had sexually assaulted him in his sleep in Pakistan after a party where whisky and marijuana were consumed, but Khan’s lawyer suggested the alleged victim, despite being heterosexual, was “consenting” at the time under the influence of alcohol, cannabis, and a sleeping pill.
Crispin Blunt, a former Conservative justice minister, on Monday called the verdict a “dreadful miscarriage of justice,” saying the case “relied on lazy tropes about LGBT+ people” and argued the result had “dreadful wider implications” for LGBT Muslims “around the world” in now-deleted comments on his website.
On Tuesday, Blunt said he decided to retract his statement defending Khan, and apologised for causing “significant upset and concern not least to victims of sexual offences.”
Blunt, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on Global LGBT+ Rights, said he had offered his resignation to the APPG, as his initial statement risked distracting the group from “its important purpose.”
Asked if the government distanced itself from Blunt’s initial comments, defence minister James Heappey told Sky News that it did.
Heappey said all he knew was that Khan was found guilty by a court of law and that “absolutely nobody in Her Majesty’s Government is seeking to be critical of the decision of the court.”
Heappey said he understands that Khan was planning to appeal, adding, “But quite frankly everybody in government respects that a court of law has found him guilty and that must be the judgment until he appeals successfully.”
Following the verdict, Labour called on Khan to “immediately resign” as an MP.
A Labour Party spokesman said, “Imran Ahmad Khan should immediately resign so a by-election can take place and the people of Wakefield can get the representation they deserve.”
