Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered authorities to move former Prime Minister Imran Khan from Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail to a specific private facility, Islamabad’s Shifa International Hospital, within two days over concerns about his health. Instead, early Friday morning, Khan was taken to a different, state run hospital, examined for a few hours, declared medically fit, and returned to Adiala before dawn.
The government said it redirected Khan to the state run PIMS Hospital rather than Shifa because of a security situation created by supporters of Khan’s party along the route to the private facility. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party disputes that account, saying it had told its own workers to stay away from Shifa the day before, and has called the substitution a defiance of the court’s actual order.
Why Does It Matter Which Hospital He Was Actually Taken To?
The distinction is not incidental. A private hospital that Khan’s family and legal team had specifically requested would have meant less direct state control over who could see him and what could be verified about his condition. A state run facility, examined briefly and released before dawn, keeps that control squarely with the same government defending itself in the underlying case. PTI has called the sequence a merely symbolic exercise rather than genuine compliance with the Supreme Court’s order.
Khan, who has now spent roughly three years in custody on a range of charges his supporters call politically motivated, remains at Adiala. Whether the government’s substitution of one hospital for another amounts to compliance or defiance of a Supreme Court order is now its own dispute, layered on top of the health question that triggered the order in the first place. Additional detail is available from Al Jazeera.
