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Former Prime Minister Imran Khan sits for a portrait in his Lahore residence on March 28, 2023.

Pakistan’s election body has rejected former prime minister Imran Khan’s nomination to contest national elections due in February.

Khan’s Pakistan Tahreek-e Insaf (PTI) party said on Saturday that the former prime minister was disqualified from contesting the elections scheduled for February 2024, due to a corruption conviction.

Khan has not been seen in public since he was jailed for three years in August for unlawfully selling state gifts while in office from 2018 to 2022. The former prime minister was barred from politics for five years by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP).

His party’s media team said Khan nevertheless filed nomination papers for the elections on Friday.

The ECP said Khan’s nomination was rejected because he was not a registered voter of the constituency and because he was "convicted by the court of law and has been disqualified".

The commission had also rejected Khan’s nomination to contest the elections in his hometown, Mianwali.

His party accused election authorities of stopping most of the candidates from participating in the elections.

Khan formerly claimed he was being targeted by the military, which wanted to keep him out of the polls. The military, however, denied the allegation.

Meanwhile, the election commission accepted former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s nomination from two constituencies for the elections, weeks after a court overturned two convictions on corruption charges.

Sharif returned to his country in October to end a four-year self-imposed exile in Britain and is now bidding for a fourth premiership in the February elections.