Islamabad, Pakistan — Uzma Khanum had not seen her brother in nearly a year. When she finally did, in a borrowed office in the government-run PIMS hospital in the Pakistani capital past midnight on Friday, he stood up in shock and told the doctors around him, “This is my sister, I’m meeting her after 10 months.” The country’s Supreme Court had on Tuesday ordered Pakistani authorities to transfer former Prime Minister Imran Khan to the privately run Shifa International Hospital by midnight on Thursday, from Adiala jail, three years after he was imprisoned on a slew of charges. But by the time Khanum and Imran Khan’s personal physician, Faisal Sultan, described the night at a news conference on Friday afternoon, it had become, in their account, a story of confusion — marked by what they said was a “failure” by the government to follow the court’s order.
His lawyer told Al Jazeera that, under the order, Khan was to remain there under medical care until the case was next heard on September 16. Instead, he spent a few hours at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) before being returned to his cell by 5am on Friday, without ever setting foot inside Shifa hospital. Khan, 73, has been jailed since August 2023 over a series of convictions his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) calls politically driven.
All but one have since been suspended or overturned on appeal. Concerns over his right-eye condition, which has required months of specialist treatment, have driven the PTI’s campaign for his release and were central to the medical board report that led the court to order his transfer. A journalist who spent the night outside Shifa’s gates, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera the scene appeared designed to convince reporters that Khan would arrive there.
At the first checkpoint on the approach road, only visitors with a hospital card for a patient already inside were being waved through. At one point, a car pulled up and scattered flower petals on an empty road before driving off. Barricades went up alongside the hospital.
Senior police officers drove past repeatedly with sirens on, while armoured vehicles arrived in what the journalist called a build-up “designed to convince the media that this was, without question, the location”. For hours, the police inspector-general’s spokesperson gave nothing away. The explanation, the journalist said, became clearer later: officials appeared to have calculated that moving the crowd on would only send it looking for Khan elsewhere.
Then, quietly, an official told the journalist, “This isn’t the place, go to PIMS.” “In hindsight,” the journalist told Al Jazeera, “it is clear we were played.” Sultan, Khan’s personal physician, gave a similar account at Friday’s media conference. He said he was driven to Shifa at about 12:30am from Adiala jail and waited for close to three hours, without a phone, while officials repeatedly assured him Khan was “arriving shortly”. At about 4:30am, he was told Khan was “not going to make it here” and sent back to Adiala.
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