By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Imran Khan’s lawyer has met the jailed former prime minister and his wife, Bushra Bibi, for the first time in months, saying 40 minutes inside Adiala jail was too little to cover their cases.
Barrister Salman Safdar, who represents Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, said on Monday that jail authorities arranged the meeting at the Rawalpindi prison at 4.30pm. It was his first meeting with Khan in seven months and with Bibi in 11.
“After repeated applications and requests, I met Khan sahib after seven months and BB after 11 months,” Safdar wrote in a post on X.
The session, he said, was “insufficient to cover all cases/legal matters”. Both Khan and his wife briefed him on their health and the conditions in which they are being held, and gave him fresh instructions on several cases. He gave no details of those instructions.
Khan, the PTI founder, has been in prison since 5 August 2023, when he was jailed for three years for concealing details of Toshakhana state gifts. He is also serving a 14-year sentence with Bibi in the £190m corruption case, known as the Al-Qadir Trust case. Bibi was taken into custody on 17 January 2025, when the couple were sentenced.
The couple were convicted in another Toshakhana case in December 2025 and handed 10-year and seven-year terms. Khan also faces pending terrorism trials over the riots of 9 May 2023, which followed his first arrest. The party rejects all the charges against him as politically motivated.
The Islamabad High Court (IHC) has allowed Khan twice-weekly meetings, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with family, lawyers and associates. Despite repeated court directions, access for his family and party leaders has been largely restricted in recent months, drawing sustained criticism from PTI and his relatives.
Safdar’s previous visit came in April, a day after the IHC directed authorities to arrange it. He said then that Bibi had not been brought from her cell to join the meeting, despite requests and court orders. He later told the Supreme Court that Khan had lost a significant amount of vision in his right eye while in custody.
Conditions of detention have been contested before the courts. In August, Safdar told the IHC that Khan had told him he was held in solitary confinement for 22 hours a day, and Bibi for 24, while the Adiala superintendent told the court that neither was in solitary confinement. In September, the IHC directed jail authorities to end the couple’s isolation and give them facilities in line with prison rules.
Khan has been behind bars since his ouster as prime minister in April 2022 was followed by a string of corruption and terrorism cases. The dispute over access to him has fed a wider confrontation between PTI and the federal government.
That tension sharpened in October, when PTI launched a long march towards Islamabad led by Sohail Afridi, then chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The march began in Lakki Marwat on 4 October, with protesters demanding Khan’s release and access to medical treatment, including a meeting with his personal doctor.
On 11 October, President Asif Ali Zardari proclaimed an emergency and imposed governor’s rule in the province on the advice of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, suspending the PTI-led provincial government. The federal government cited a deteriorating security situation and alleged shortcomings in the provincial administration’s counterterrorism efforts. The measures were imposed under Articles 232 and 234 of the constitution.
Afridi and several members of his cabinet were then taken into preventive custody. Police said eight senior PTI figures were held, among them the provincial assembly speaker, Babar Saleem Swati. PTI said its provincial president, Junaid Akbar, had also been arrested. Talal Chaudhry, the minister of state for interior, confirmed the detentions and said those facing cases would be charged and tried, while the others would be released. Gohar Ali Khan, the PTI chairman, called the move a grave political mistake.
The Federal Constitutional Court disposed of a petition challenging Afridi’s appointment as chief minister, observing that he no longer held the office after governor’s rule was imposed. His brother has asked the Peshawar High Court to order his recovery and an independent judicial inquiry into his alleged abduction and detention. A senior federal government source has said the possibility of Mr Afridi returning to office has almost disappeared, even if the emergency proves temporary. The prime minister’s coordinator for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa affairs, Ikhtiar Wali Khan, has said governor’s rule could remain in force until the next elections.
Khan’s sisters, Aleema Khan, Noreen Niazi and Uzma Khan, have staged frequent sit-ins outside Adiala jail with opposition leaders, demanding his release. They have been unable to hold more since their detention in late September under the Punjab Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance, as PTI prepared its march on Islamabad.
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