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• Appeals to PM to allow Kasim and Suleiman to meet their father, says visa applications pending for 60 days
• When asked to comment, information minister says ‘there are more important issues in world’
ISLAMABAD: Jemima Goldsmith, the former wife of PTI founder Imran Khan, made a “direct appeal” to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Monday to allow her sons, Kasim Khan and Suleiman Khan, to meet their incarcerated father.
Mr Kasim and his older brother, Mr Suleiman, live in London with their mother and will have to travel to Pakistan to meet Imran, who is imprisoned at Rawalpindi’s Adiala jail.
“My sons Suleiman and Kasim Khan applied for visas in January [again…] to allow them to visit their father, Imran Khan, in Pakistan. The Pakistan consulate states that online visa processing normally takes 7–10 working days. It has now been 60 days,” Ms Jemima wrote in a post on X.
She said the delay in the issuance of visas was despite Defence Minister Khawaja Asif publicly “promising that they [Mr Kasim and Mr Suleiman] could safely travel there to see their father after four years”. She added that the PM’s spokesperson for foreign media, Mosharraf Zaidi, had made a similar commitment.
“Meanwhile, they [Kasim and Suleiman] are not allowed to speak to him [Mr Khan] on the phone, nor send him a letter. They haven’t seen him since 2022, after he was shot in an assassination attempt,” she continued.
“This is an appeal directly to Pakistan’s PM Shehbaz to please allow Imran Khan’s two sons to see their father as soon as possible, particularly since, by all accounts, his health is in decline,” she wrote.
‘More important issues’
When Dawn approached government representatives for a comment on the matter, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar replied: “There are more important issues in the world right now.”
Last month, Kasim alleged that the government was “deliberately” refusing to process his and his brother’s visas.
Kasim and Suleiman said in December that the two had applied for their visas and were planning a trip to Pakistan in January. However, reports emerged last month alleging that the government was refusing to grant visas to Imran’s sons.
Last year in July, Minister of State for Law and Justice Barrister Aqeel Malik had warned that the government could deny entry to Imran’s sons if they travelled to Pakistan in an attempt to “spread discord”.
This came after Imran’s sister, Aleema Khan, told reporters a day earlier outside Adiala jail that the two would join a PTI protest movement.
Barrister Aqeel said the government had no issue with Kasim and Suleiman entering Pakistan, provided they did not engage in protests or political activity.
In August 2025, Aleema Khan had also clarified that Imran’s sons had applied for National Identity Cards for Overseas Pakistanis (Nicop) as well as visas to visit Pakistan, after Minister of State for Interior Talal Chaudhry had questioned why they would need visas if they had a Nicop.
Published in Dawn, March 17th, 2026
