Islamabad:
Jemima Goldsmith, the former wife of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, accused the Pakistani government of having hosted a personal vendetta against her children, a complaint strongly rejected by a party legislator on Thursday.
Imran, the founder of Pakistan Tehreek-e-insaf (PTI), has been imprisoned in the adial prison in Rawalpindi since August 2023. He had announced that the party would launch a protest movement against the government after Ashura-E-Muharram, which was observed on Sunday.
This week, Imran’s sister Aleema Khan said that the sons of Imran, Suleman Khan and Kasim Khan, would join the protest movement. However, the Prime Minister’s adviser on Rana Sanaullah political affairs later warned that Khan’s sons would be arrested if they joined the demonstration in Pakistan.
Goldsmith posted on X that Imran had been kept in prison in prison for almost two years and preventing his children from talking to their father and threatening them to stop them if they were trying to visit him, equivalent to a “personal vendetta”.
“My children are not allowed to speak on the phone to their father Imran Khan,” she said. “The government of Pakistan has now said that if they were going to try to see it, they will also be arrested and put behind bars. It does not happen in a democracy or a functional state. It is not politics. It is a personal vendetta.”
Reacting to the remarks, the leader of Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan (PML-N), the leader Irfan Siddiqui, told a private news channel that the release of Imran de prison did not depend on his children or his sisters but on his own behavior.
“If the children of Imran Khan want to come to Pakistan and do politics, they should come. If they direct a movement within the framework of the law, no one will objection. [But] His release is not possible for his children or his sisters, but rather this question depends completely on his own behavior, “he said.
“If Imran Khan wants to put their children in politics and if they put activities according to the law, they have the right to do so,” he said, adding that questions like prisons have not been decided due to political pressure or family influence, but by law.
