Pakistan cricket’s turbulent tour of England has spilled far beyond matters on the field, with Imran Khan’s sons launching a scathing attack on Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Mohsin Naqvi over the controversy surrounding an interview they gave about their imprisoned father. The flashpoint came during the second Test between England and Pakistan at Lord’s, when Sky Sports aired a pre-recorded interview conducted by former England captain Michael Atherton with Imran’s sons, Sulaiman and Kasim Khan. The brothers spoke about their concerns over the former Pakistan prime minister’s health and treatment in prison.
The PCB was reportedly unhappy with the interview and attempted to prevent it from being broadcast. After it eventually aired during the Test, reports in England and Pakistan claimed the board threatened that the Pakistan team would not return to the field. The match, however, continued after the intervention of the England and Wales Cricket Board. Pakistan captain Babar Azam and then-head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed subsequently said they had no knowledge of any proposed boycott, suggesting that whatever discussions took place were at the administrative level rather than involving the players.
Now, Kasim and Sulaiman have taken direct aim at the PCB over the episode. “They made absolute fools of themselves,” Kasim told The Telegraph.
Sulaiman said he had anticipated a reaction to the interview, but not one involving Pakistan’s participation in an international Test match. “I was expecting some sort of response,” Sulaiman said, “but I didn’t think they would be so tactless as to threaten not to take to the field. It shouldn’t be in the remit of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) to ask for an interview about an ex-Pakistan player, somebody who lived in England for 22 years, to be taken down. This wasn’t about politics, but about the humanitarian situation and his health.”
The controversy carries another layer because Naqvi is not only the chairman of the PCB but also Pakistan’s interior minister. Imran, who captained Pakistan to their historic 1992 World Cup triumph before entering politics, has been one of the country’s most prominent opposition figures.
Imran Khan’s sons make explosive allegations over his health
The brothers’ criticism of the PCB came as part of a much wider interview in which they expressed increasingly grave fears about their father’s condition in prison. Kasim made an extraordinary allegation about the intentions of the authorities towards Imran. “They’re clearly hoping to kill him in there,” he said. “They want to silence him as secretly as possible and just slowly make him fade into nothing. That’s a very difficult thing to do with the most popular person in Pakistan right now. Their strategy, whenever we speak, is to let everything fizzle out and then impose more brutal restrictions that make it even harder for him to survive.”
The allegation has not been independently established, while Pakistani authorities have repeatedly rejected accusations of mistreatment and maintained that Imran has been provided appropriate medical care. Sulaiman, however, said the family remained deeply suspicious of the information emerging about their father’s health.
“The worrying theory we’re hearing,” he said, “is that they’re drip-feeding these reports of his ailing health and pretending that they’re trying to help him, just to lay the ground for something worse to happen. Then they can wash their hands and say: ‘He’s just an old man who died, and we had nothing to do with it.’”
Their concerns intensified following the controversy surrounding Imran’s medical examination. Pakistan’s Supreme Court had ordered that he be taken to the private Shifa International Hospital, but he was ultimately examined at the state-run Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences. “It was a complete charade, and very murky from our perspective,” Kasim said. “The doctors at Shifa were left waiting for him with our auntie, who is also a medic. Everyone who had been booked, everything that had been ordered, was just ignored.”
Sulaiman described the episode as appearing like a deliberate diversion. “It seemed like a bait-and-switch,” he said, “in which they did actually dispatch a convoy to Shifa as a decoy, only to send him to PIMS, the same place he had been several times before.”
He also questioned the lack of information available directly to the family. “They haven’t given us proof of any of this,” Sulaiman said. “It’s all just hearsay from government sources – there’s no transparency, they don’t want to give anyone access, so how are we supposed to believe any of it? The last verifiable piece of information we had was from him, six months ago, when he spoke about his eye and how it had been neglected.”
The row comes at a particularly difficult time for the PCB, with Pakistan also enduring a troubled tour on the field. But the sons’ latest remarks have ensured that the most damaging questions surrounding the board are no longer restricted to cricketing results.
