Islamabad: The sons of Imran Khan have pleaded for the release of the jailed former prime minister in a public appeal filled with desperate concern about his safety, as weeks of court-ordered prison visits being blocked and an information blackout have left them fearing “something irreversible,” December 1, 2025. In written statements and interviews, Kasim and Sulaiman Khan claim Pakistan’s prison authorities are violating judicial orders to allow Imran Khan regular family access at Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail and will not allow his lawyers or doctor to see him — transforming the case from a political dispute into what they describe as a human rights crisis.
Imran Khan’s sons claim family has ‘no proof of life’
Kasim Khan, speaking to Reuters, said the family has had no contact with Imran Khan for more than three weeks and that they are yet to have direct or verified access despite a court order demanding weekly meetings, making it. Hence, they now “have no verifiable information at all” about the 72-year-old’s condition. He called, not knowing whether his father is safe, injured or even alive, “psychological torture,” and said he has the impression that authorities are hiding “something irreversible” from the family.
In a related petition carried by the Indian Express, Kasim said Imran Khan has been in custody for 845 days and was placed six weeks ago in solitary confinement (and)in a death cell with “zero transparency” about his treatment. He claimed they had not made any phone calls, met or seen “proof of life” — that even his aunts, the former premier’s sisters, were turned back at the gates despite clear court orders allowing them access.
In the wake of Khan’s quarantine, Kasim has said that international human rights organisations, other foreign governments and every democratic voice should call for proof of life regarding Imran Khan and for court-ordered access to him as well as “an end to his politically motivated isolation” within Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. His language mirrors months of party warnings that Imran Khan’s prosecutions and conditions in prison were intended to remove him from Pakistan’s political equation.
Family says court orders for access to Imran Khan have been repeatedly ignored
The latest complaint comes from Imran Khan’s sister, Aleema Khan, who is pursuing a contempt of court petition over blocked visits, charging that the host, the Adiala Jail authorities, have failed to follow a March 24 order of the Islamabad High Court restoring twice-weekly meetings with family, lawyers and friends. Officials prepared standard operating procedures in March 2024 that regulated interviews with Imran Khan on Tuesdays and Thursdays, according to the petition. Still, relatives and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf leaders say they remained barred from entry, leading them to repeatedly appeal to the courts.
According to a report in the Daily Sun, Aleema’s petition charges the superintendent of Adiala Jail and senior federal and provincial authorities with “wilfully flouting” the High Court Orders and deliberately depriving Imran Khan’s legal team, family members , and workers of access. The filing requests that judges initiate contempt proceedings and order prison officials to abide by the visitation schedule they themselves signed off on in previous court orders.
Pakistan’s Interior Ministry has not publicly reacted to the sons’ latest statements, and a senior jail official, who spoke anonymously to Reuters, denied that Imran Khan was in poor health and said he was unaware of any plans to return him to a high-security facility. The reassurances have done little to calm public fears since suspected Taliban media outlets in Afghanistan and their allies in Pakistan picked up unverified reports that Imran Khan had already been “mysteriously killed” at Adiala Jail, with the Pakistani authorities denying the rumours even as his legal team said Gul could not be visited by his family.
Imran Khan’s sons have been raising the alarm for months.
Kasim and Sulaiman Khan began speaking publicly by the middle of 2025, after years of staying out of the public eye, to warn about their father’s isolation. The brothers spoke together in an unusual joint interview with The Independent in May, declaring that they had “exhausted” all available legal avenues and calling for international pressure — including from former US president Donald Trump — to bring Imran Khan home “from the hellhole of Adiala jail.” He was being held in indefinite solitude, they said; denied access to doctors and the outside world; his court-ordered calls and visits were severely restricted, even as fellow detainees overwhelmingly reported denying any knowledge about him.
By July, the brothers were preparing to fly to Pakistan for an August 5 rally marking the anniversary, as they describe it, of Imran Khan’s illegal arrest in 2023, according to an NDTV report. Their mother, the British film-maker Jemima Goldsmith, said in a social media post her sons had been told they faced arrest if they tried to visit or contact their father, saying Imran Khan had served almost two years in solitary confinement with no phone calls to his children.
Their latest “no proof of life” message is that even the limited physical access they had earlier in the year has now broken down entirely, and Imran Khan’s family are forced to rely on faceless officials and speculation to get an impression of his condition. For the brothers, the battle is now more than just freeing a polarising former prime minister; it is also about compelling Pakistan’s authorities to follow their own courts and demonstrating that Mr Khan is alive, reachable, and not being held under conditions his family says have been imposed to erase him from political life.
In an appeal, Kasim and Sulaiman say they will continue to push Pakistan’s judiciary, foreign governments, and global rights bodies until court-ordered visits resume and independent doctors can assess Imran Khan. “Not a phone call, not one meeting, not an iota of proof of life,” Kasim wrote in one post, pledging that until those most basic requirements are met, the family will treat his father’s case as more than just a political detention but as Imran Khan’s now imminent survival.
