Two convictions are keeping him in prison, both under appeal. Two more stand with their sentences suspended and their appeals undecided. Two were set aside on acquittal, and a United Nations body has found his detention arbitrary.
Kasim and Sulaiman Khan told Michael Atherton, during a break in play at Lord’s, that they had gone seven months without contact with their father, and that reports placed the vision in his right eye at fifteen per cent. The Pakistan Cricket Board lodged a formal complaint with the broadcaster about the interview.
Their father has been in custody since August 2023. Six convictions have been recorded against him. Two are keeping him in prison, both under appeal. Two more stand with their sentences suspended and their appeals undecided. Two were set aside on acquittal, and a United Nations body has found his detention arbitrary.
The record is more specific, and more mixed, than coverage in either direction usually allows.
The Removal
Khan became prime minister in August 2018. He was removed on 10 April 2022 by a no-confidence motion passed by a majority in the National Assembly, the constitutional mechanism available to Pakistan’s legislature for removing a sitting prime minister. Shehbaz Sharif was elected prime minister by the same chamber the following day.
What The Toshakhana Is
The Toshakhana is the state gift depository, administered by the Cabinet Division. Gifts received by public officials from foreign governments are state property and must be deposited there. An official wishing to keep a gift may buy it by paying a percentage of a value set by an internal committee.
How the committee arrives at a valuation has never been disclosed. That percentage was historically around twenty per cent, and Cabinet Division records covering 2002 to 2022 show presidents, prime ministers and ministers of every party retaining luxury items at those rates. On paper the transactions were lawful.
Khan’s government amended the rules on 18 December 2018, raising the retention rate to fifty per cent.
The Election Commission’s order records what followed. Khan received 160 gifts between the 2018 and 2021 financial years. He deposited 52. He retained items amounting to 95.84 per cent of the total assessed value, Rs 141.89 million worth, for payments totalling Rs 37.88 million. His effective rate across the period works out at roughly 27 per cent, because the most expensive items were retained at twenty.
The gift received from the Saudi crown prince was bought on 22 January 2019, thirty-five days after his own government had set the rate at fifty per cent, and it was paid for at twenty.
Three of the six convictions arise from the Toshakhana. They are separate proceedings, brought by different bodies, over different gifts.
The Watches
A National Accountability Bureau inquiry reported by Geo News in May 2024 examined seven further watches.
The inquiry found that the gifts had been valued in what its report called an unscrupulous and slipshod manner, by a private appraiser who was not an industry expert and did not possess the experience or expertise to make the assessments. When the same items were later revalued through the Federal Board of Revenue, the Ministry of Industries and the Pakistan Gems and Jewellery Traders and Exporters Association, the figures came back substantially higher.
On one item, a Graff watch set, the inquiry found the sale to be a deliberate and coordinated effort to benefit the purchaser. The set was sold to a buyer named Mohammad Shafiq for Rs 51 million before it had been retained from the depository. The Rs 20 million retention cost was then also paid by Shafiq, handed to staff of the Protocol section.
An earlier report in June 2022 had found that three watches with a combined assessed value above Rs 154 million were sold to a local dealer, with the most expensive assessed above Rs 101 million, declared sold for Rs 51 million, and Rs 20 million deposited against it.
The Buyer
In November 2022 a Dubai-based businessman, Umar Farooq Zahoor, told Geo News that he had bought a Graff MasterGraff Tourbillon set gifted by the Saudi crown prince for two million dollars in cash, roughly Rs 280 million at the time. He said Khan’s accountability adviser Mirza Shahzad Akbar referred him to Farhat Shehzadi, known as Farah Khan, in March 2019, and that she opened at four to five million dollars and insisted on cash. He produced the watch before cameras and signed an affidavit.
Khan called Zahoor a known fraudster and an internationally wanted criminal and said he would sue him and Geo. No proceedings followed. Farah Khan separately sent a Rs 5 billion legal notice to Zahoor, Geo and the presenter.
Zahoor’s own standing is contested. Dawn reported he had been wanted in Norway, Switzerland, Türkiye and Pakistan since 2009 over financial crimes. Geo reported that the cases against him were later closed by courts and investigators for lack of evidence. Shahzad Akbar denied the account, saying he had never met or spoken to Zahoor. Akbar resigned in January 2022, left Pakistan on 17 April 2022, and is reported to be in London. He is named as a key accused in the Al-Qadir reference.
The London Settlement
In December 2019 Britain’s National Crime Agency reached an out-of-court civil settlement with the family of the property developer Malik Riaz, owner of Bahria Town, over approximately £190 million in frozen assets, including a London property at 1 Hyde Park Place. The funds were repatriated to the government of Pakistan.
On 3 December 2019 Khan chaired a federal cabinet meeting that approved a deed of confidentiality relating to that settlement. Ministers present have since described a document circulated in a sealed envelope and approved without its contents being read. The deed has never been made public.
The repatriated funds were then applied against Bahria Town’s own outstanding liability of approximately Rs 460 billion, arising from a separate Supreme Court judgment concerning land in Karachi. Money recovered from Malik Riaz in Britain, and returned to the Pakistani state, was therefore credited toward a debt Malik Riaz owed that same state. The exchequer received no net addition.
On 26 December 2019, twenty-three days after the cabinet meeting, the Al-Qadir Trust was registered in Islamabad. Its trustees were Khan, Bushra Bibi, Zulfi Bukhari, Babar Awan and Farah Khan. The deed was later amended to list Khan and Bushra Bibi alone.
The Land Transfers
In March 2021 Bahria Town donated 458 kanals at Mauza Bakrala, Tehsil Sohawa, District Jhelum, with an on-paper value of Rs 530 million, together with Rs 285 million in cash, to the Al-Qadir Trust. Al-Qadir University was built on the land.
A separate 240 kanals were transferred to Farhat Shehzadi by Ahmad Ali Riaz Malik, the son of Malik Riaz. Shehzadi is a close friend of Bushra Bibi and held no government or party position. A prosecution witness testified that Ali Riaz Malik had also purchased land for her in Bani Gala.
In June 2022 an audio recording circulated, purportedly of Malik Riaz and his daughter, in which the two discuss Shehzadi conveying that the former first lady had declined a three-carat diamond ring and asked for a five-carat one. Riaz said the recording was fabricated.
The Departure
Shehzadi left Pakistan in the first days of April 2022, within days of the no-confidence vote, the first senior figure associated with the outgoing government to do so. The Federal Investigation Agency has stated in a request to Interpol that she departed for the United Arab Emirates on 3 April 2022. She travelled onward to the United States and later returned to Dubai. She has not come back.
The FIA sought an Interpol red corner notice in connection with FIR 04/23 of its anti-money laundering circle in Lahore. Speaking to Geo News in 2023, Shehzadi said she was outside Pakistan because she could be targeted for political revenge, and that she had held no official or party position.
The First Toshakhana Conviction
The Election Commission ruled in October 2022 that Khan had made false statements and incorrect declarations about retained gifts, and disqualified him. Khan had written to the Commission acknowledging the sale of at least four items.
A district and sessions court convicted him in August 2023 under the Elections Act, sentencing him to three years with a five-year bar from office.
The Islamabad High Court suspended that sentence on 29 August 2023 and ordered his release. The conviction itself was left intact, which is why the disqualification held, and Khan returned to the court that October seeking suspension of the trial court’s judgment. The Supreme Court had observed days earlier that the verdict was delivered in haste and without a proper right of defence, and that there were prima facie shortcomings in it. Khan was not released regardless. A special court under the Official Secrets Act ordered him held in a separate case.
The Cipher Case
In January 2024 a special court inside Adiala Jail sentenced Khan and Shah Mehmood Qureshi to ten years each over a diplomatic cable sent from Pakistan’s embassy in Washington in March 2022, which Khan had publicly characterised as evidence of a foreign effort to remove him.
His principal secretary, Azam Khan, testified that the original cable had been misplaced from the Prime Minister’s Office and that Khan displayed a different document at a rally that March. A separate audio recording, whose authenticity Khan acknowledged, captured him instructing an aide to use the cable politically without naming the United States directly.
The Islamabad High Court acquitted both men on 3 June 2024, finding the prosecution had failed to prove its case and criticising a trial held behind closed doors inside a prison under a media gag order.
The Second Toshakhana Conviction
On 31 January 2024, eight days before the general election, Accountability Court No. 1 in Islamabad convicted Khan and Bushra Bibi in a National Accountability Bureau reference filed the previous month, concerning a jewellery set received from the Saudi crown prince and retained against an assessment the Bureau alleged was heavily undervalued. Both were sentenced to fourteen years, fined Rs 787 million each, and barred from public office for ten years.
The Islamabad High Court suspended those sentences on 1 April 2024 and granted bail. Khan’s counsel asked the bench to suspend the conviction as well. Justice Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb declined, observing that the matter was before the Supreme Court. The convictions stand, and as of April 2026 the couple were still petitioning the court to fix their appeals for hearing, arguing the prosecution was using dilatory tactics.
The Iddat Case
A trial court sentenced Khan and Bushra Bibi to seven years each in February 2024 on a complaint that their marriage took place during her mandatory waiting period following divorce. The complainant was Khawar Maneka, Bushra Bibi’s former husband.
Additional District and Sessions Judge Muhammad Afzal Majoka set the conviction aside on 13 July 2024, finding the complainant had failed to prove his case. Maneka has challenged the acquittal at the Islamabad High Court. Within two days of the acquittal, Punjab police arrested Khan in twelve fresh terrorism cases.
The Al-Qadir Trust Verdict
The National Accountability Bureau’s case is that the sequence amounts to an exchange. Cabinet approved a sealed settlement. Three weeks later a trust was registered, and the man who had benefited from that settlement transferred land and cash to it.
On 17 January 2025, Judge Nasir Javed Rana sentenced Khan to fourteen years and Bushra Bibi to seven, with fines of Rs 1 million and Rs 500,000, and ordered the property of Al-Qadir University forfeited to the federal government.
The court recorded that the prosecution’s case rested principally on documentary evidence and that the defence, given repeated opportunity, had not refuted it. Khan’s petition to the High Court contested the Bureau’s jurisdiction and argued the case fell outside the National Accountability Ordinance, rather than disputing the transactions.
Zulfi Bukhari, a former trustee, told The Independent that he had been pressured to testify against Khan, alleging threats to his family and offers of leniency, which he declined.
Sentence suspension pleas were rejected in May 2026. The appeals against conviction are before a division bench of the Islamabad High Court, which in July 2026 granted the defence a final opportunity to present arguments, warning it would otherwise decide on the available record. They remain undecided.
The Third Toshakhana Conviction
On 20 December 2025, Special Judge Central Shahrukh Arjumand sentenced Khan and Bushra Bibi to seventeen years each, ten under the Penal Code for criminal breach of trust and seven under the Prevention of Corruption Act, with fines of Rs 16.4 million each.
This reference, indicted in December 2024, concerns a Bulgari set of necklace, bracelet, ring and earrings received during the Saudi visit of 7 to 10 May 2021. It was assessed at approximately Rs 80 million and retained for Rs 2.9 million, a rate under four per cent against a rule requiring fifty.
Khan’s lawyers argued the investigating agency lacked authority to bring the charge and that a prime minister does not meet the statutory definition of a public servant under anti-corruption law. The defence presented no evidence contesting the underlying facts. PTI said family and lawyers were barred from the proceedings.
May 2023 And The Military Courts
Khan’s arrest on 9 May 2023 was followed within hours by riots. At least ten people were killed and roughly forty public buildings and military installations were damaged, including the Lahore Corps Commander’s House, General Headquarters in Rawalpindi and the Mianwali air base. More than five thousand people were arrested. Khan has said agencies, rather than his supporters, were responsible.
An anti-terrorism court indicted Khan and more than a hundred others in December 2024 over the GHQ attack. That trial remains at the evidence stage. In November 2024 a Lahore anti-terrorism court refused him bail in eight cases in an order using the word guilty, which was an observation in a bail refusal rather than a verdict. The Supreme Court granted him bail in those eight cases on 21 August 2025. He remains in prison on the two corruption convictions.
Forty-seven co-accused, including Omar Ayub and Zartaj Gul, have received ten-year sentences. Eight senior party figures received the same in a separate Lahore proceeding in which Shah Mehmood Qureshi was acquitted.
On 7 May 2025 the Supreme Court’s constitutional bench voted five to two to overturn its own October 2023 ruling and restore the provisions of the Pakistan Army Act permitting military trials of civilians. It directed Parliament to legislate a right of appeal to the High Courts within forty-five days. Amnesty International recorded in May 2026 that no such legislation had been passed, and that 105 protesters had been convicted by military courts.
The Wider Caseload
A Ministry of Interior report submitted to the Islamabad High Court in December 2024 put the number of cases registered against Khan at 188: 99 in Punjab, 76 in Islamabad and 2 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. PTI has consistently used a figure above 200. The Islamabad total had risen from 62 to 76 in the weeks after the D-Chowk protest of November 2024 alone.
The overwhelming majority arise from May 2023 and its aftermath, filed under the Anti-Terrorism Act across Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Punjab districts, frequently in near-identical terms in multiple jurisdictions over the same events. Others concern the D-Chowk protest, contempt proceedings and election-related complaints. Most have never reached trial. Bail has been granted in many and refused in others, and the pattern of arrest on release in one case under charges in another runs through the whole record.
The Party Funding Case
On 2 August 2022 the Election Commission ruled unanimously that PTI had received prohibited funding. Its order records donations from 34 foreign nationals and 351 foreign-based companies, including $2,121,500 from Wootton Cricket Limited, a Cayman Islands entity associated with Arif Naqvi. It found the party had acknowledged eight accounts, concealed sixteen and left thirteen unexplained, and that Khan had submitted a false affidavit. PTI challenged the ruling at the Islamabad High Court. The seizure and criminal track has not concluded.
Malik Riaz
Malik Riaz was declared a proclaimed offender in the Al-Qadir case in 2024 and is in the United Arab Emirates. In April 2026 the NAB chairman announced Interpol red notices against Riaz and his son Ali Riaz, citing alleged laundering of more than Rs 700 billion. He said bringing Riaz back would be a challenge, citing Dubai’s annoyance with Pakistan, and a senior government official told The Nation that the chances were slim in the absence of a formal extradition treaty. Riaz has never been tried in Pakistan.
The International Record
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued Opinion No. 22/2024, opening its inquiry on 7 November 2023, adopting the opinion in late March 2024 and publishing it that July.
The opinion predates the Al-Qadir conviction by nine months and the third Toshakhana conviction by nearly two years. Neither of the cases currently keeping Khan in prison has been examined by any international body. What the Working Group examined was the earlier sequence, including the practice of re-arresting Khan on acquittal or bail in one case to detain him under another. It ruled under Category II, a finding that detention arose from the exercise of protected political rights. It made no determination as to whether the conduct alleged in any case occurred.
On the cipher case, the Working Group and the Islamabad High Court arrived at the same conclusion independently, one on the pattern of detention and one on the evidence.
Amnesty International has called for Khan’s release. Sixty members of the US Congress signed a letter to the same effect in October 2024, and a bill introduced in March 2025 proposes sanctions on Pakistani officials.
Health And Conditions
On 12 December 2025 the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Alice Jill Edwards, stated that Khan had reportedly been held for excessive periods in solitary confinement, confined for twenty-three hours a day under constant camera surveillance, and noted that solitary confinement beyond fifteen days constitutes torture under international standards.
Khan’s lawyers told the Supreme Court in February 2026 that he had lost approximately 85 per cent of vision in his right eye. PTI has said the party has no independent medical reports.
On 17 August 2026 the Adiala jail superintendent submitted a report to the Supreme Court stating that Khan’s vision had returned to almost normal, citing 39 checkups between November 2023 and August 2026, treatment for right central retinal vein occlusion, and 84 weekly meetings with Bushra Bibi.
Twenty-two former international cricket captains, including Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Clive Lloyd and Allan Border, published an appeal on 24 August 2026 for adequate medical care. No independent medical assessment has been published.
Where The Record Stands
Six convictions have been recorded. Two, in the Al-Qadir Trust case and the third Toshakhana case, are keeping Khan in prison, both handed down by Pakistani courts on documentary evidence, both under appeal, and neither examined at appellate level or by any international body. Two more, the first and second Toshakhana convictions, stand with their sentences suspended since August 2023 and April 2024 and their appeals undecided. Two, the cipher and iddat cases, were set aside on acquittal by Pakistani courts sitting under the present government. One trial remains unresolved, and roughly 180 further cases have never reached one.
Prosecutions Under Khan
Politically charged prosecutions have been a recurring feature of Pakistani politics under every government, and Khan’s own tenure forms part of that record.
On 1 July 2019 the Anti-Narcotics Force stopped the vehicle of Rana Sanaullah, then an opposition member of the National Assembly, and stated that fifteen kilogrammes of heroin had been recovered. Khan’s interior minister said publicly the government had all the proof. The quantity carried a potential death sentence. Sanaullah was refused bail twice and held for nearly six months. In December 2022 the two Anti-Narcotics Force officers listed as recovery witnesses submitted affidavits stating that no narcotics had been recovered and that they had been named as witnesses without their knowledge. He was acquitted.
Khawaja Saad Rafique spent 404 days in custody in the Paragon Housing reference before the Supreme Court granted bail in March 2020. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, a former prime minister, was held roughly seven months from July 2019; the reference was later withdrawn by NAB and all accused acquitted. Shehbaz Sharif and Hamza Shehbaz were both detained, Hamza for around twenty months, and both were acquitted after NAB told the court it had found no evidence of corruption or money laundering. Maryam Nawaz was acquitted in the Avenfield reference in September 2022.
Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman, editor-in-chief of the Jang and Geo group, was arrested by NAB in March 2020 over a land transaction dated 1986, under a law that took effect in 1990. He was held more than eight months at the complaint verification stage before the Supreme Court granted bail, with one judge observing that the case had been made with discrimination.
Those cases were brought while Khan was in office. Their eventual collapse has no bearing on the merits of the cases now against him, which stand or fall on their own evidence.
Transparency
The proper test for every case, in both directions, is the evidence produced in open court and an appellate process conducted transparently and without avoidable delay. That test has not been consistently met by any government in Pakistan, including Khan’s.
Two features recur regardless of who holds power. Trials have been held inside prisons, behind closed doors, with lawyers and family excluded. Bail has been denied or rendered meaningless by immediate re-arrest under a fresh charge. Both practices were criticised by the Islamabad High Court in the cipher case and by the UN Working Group in Opinion 22/2024. Both continue.
Khan’s rights as a prisoner, including access to healthcare, to legal counsel and to family contact, are not contingent on the strength of the cases against him. Where claims about his treatment circulate internationally, the durable answer is disclosure. Independent medical assessment, published on the record, would settle in a week what competing statements have not settled in three years.
The Pakistan Playbook will continue reporting on the appeals as they proceed. ■
Correction, 29 August 2026: An earlier version of this piece stated that the Islamabad High Court suspended Khan’s conviction in the first Toshakhana case on 29 August 2023; the court suspended the sentence, and the conviction remained intact. An earlier version also omitted the conviction of 31 January 2024 in the National Accountability Bureau’s Toshakhana reference, in which Khan and Bushra Bibi were sentenced to fourteen years each, suspended on 1 April 2024 with the convictions left standing. The counts throughout have been corrected to reflect six convictions. Our thanks to the readers who flagged both.
