ISLAMABAD (The Thursday Times) — The Islamabad High Court has said it expects the lawyers of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, to stick to legal issues after meeting their clients and to make no statements in public or to the media, according to its written order.
The division bench of Chief Justice Sardar Muhammad Sarfraz Dogar and Justice Muhammad Asif described the counsel, Sardar Latif Khosa and Salman Safdar, as “very professional counsels” and said it expected them to “confine themselves only to the extent of legal issues”, the order said, as reported.
Appeals on November 18
The bench, which is hearing the couple’s appeals against their convictions in the £190 million Al-Qadir Trust case, gave the defence a week to prepare and relisted the appeals for November 18. It directed its office to prepare the paper books within seven days.
The two-page order covers the November 10 hearing, at which the court directed the Islamabad advocate general to arrange a meeting of at least one hour between the lawyers and their clients at Adiala jail. Khosa had told the bench he could not argue the appeals without meeting his client, while Safdar said his previous meeting had been too short.
The lawyers met Imran and Bushra for about three hours on November 11. Afterwards, Safdar said legal and medical matters had been discussed, and Khosa said Imran’s health and his legal cases had come up, as well as a possible 28th Constitutional Amendment. The PTI’s secretary general, Salman Akram Raja, later relayed what he said was Imran’s message to the party to stand firm on its ideology.
An accountability court convicted Imran and Bushra in the case in January 2025, sentencing them to 14 and seven years in prison. The prosecution alleged that the couple received land and other benefits from the property developer Malik Riaz in return for facilitating the settlement of £190 million recovered by Britain’s National Crime Agency. Both deny wrongdoing.
