By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAFD: Jemima Goldsmith, the former wife of imprisoned former prime minister Imran Khan, issued a direct public appeal Monday to the Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, urging him to intervene so that her two sons can visit their father in Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail.
The sons, Suleiman Khan and Kasim Khan, who live with their mother in London, applied for Pakistani visas in January. More than 60 days later — far beyond the normal processing time of seven to 10 working days — the applications remain unresolved, Goldsmith wrote on the social media platform X. “Meanwhile, they are not allowed to speak to him on the phone, nor send him a letter,” she added. “They haven’t seen him since 2022, after he was shot in an assassination attempt. This is an appeal directly to Pakistan’s PM Shehbaz to please allow Imran Khan’s two sons to see their father asap, particularly since, by all accounts, his health is in decline.”
Goldsmith noted that the delay persists despite explicit public assurances from senior government figures. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif had promised the boys could travel safely to see their father after four years apart. Mosharraf Zaidi, the prime minister’s spokesperson for foreign media, had made a similar commitment.
Kasim Khan alleged last month that the government was deliberately refusing to process the visas. In December 2025, the brothers themselves had announced plans to travel in January after submitting applications. When contacted by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn for comment on Monday, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar offered a terse response: “There are more important issues in the world now.”
The bureaucratic back-and-forth stretches back months. In August 2025, Minister of State for Interior Tallal Chaudhry publicly questioned why the sons would even need visas if they held National Identity Cards for Overseas Pakistanis, known as Nicops. Imran Khan’s sister, Aleema Khan, responded by clarifying that one son’s Nicop was missing and the other could not locate his card. The family had therefore submitted fresh Nicop applications — valid for six to seven years — alongside the visa requests, which she said could normally be issued within an hour.
By December 2025, Chaudhry was insisting he had asked Aleema Khan for tracking numbers of the applications and had received none. “Till today, I have not received tracking numbers,” he said at the time. “We are very clear that anyone who wants to come to Pakistan, we will issue them visas within a few hours.” He added that, according to official records, the sons had not renewed their Nicops for more than two years and had not applied for visas.
The government’s stance hardened further in July last year when Minister of State for Law and Justice Barrister Aqeel Malik warned that entry could be denied if the sons engaged in political activity. The statement followed reports that Aleema Khan had told reporters outside Adiala Jail that the boys intended to join a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf protest movement. Malik insisted the government had “no issue” with their entry provided they refrained from protests or any other political involvement.
Khan, the founder of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, has been imprisoned since 2023 on a series of charges his supporters dismiss as politically motivated. His sons have had no direct contact with him — neither visits, phone calls nor letters — since an assassination attempt in 2022 left him wounded.
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