Ex‑cricket captains demand proper medical care for Imran Khan
A group of 17 former cricket captains, including India’s Sunil Gavaskar and England’s Sir Alastair Cook, has asked Pakistan’s current prime minister Shehbaz Sharif to ensure that former captain and ex‑prime minister Imran Khan receives full medical care while he remains in custody.
Khan, who is 73, was jailed in August 2023 on corruption charges that his party Pakistan Tehreek‑e‑Insaf says are politically motivated. He has spent more than three years in prison, during which time he has been denied the medical treatment he requires.
In a letter to Sharif, the former skippers warned that the state‑appointed medical team had only allowed Khan a few hours at a government hospital last week, even though a Supreme Court order demanded a comprehensive medical assessment.
The captains outlined three demands:
- A medical board, directed by the Supreme Court and including Khan’s own doctors, must assess his vision loss in the right eye.
- The court‑ordered weekly visits from Khan’s family must be allowed without interruption or administrative delay.
- Any treatment the board recommends must be provided without delay.
Sir Alastair Cook, the letter’s initiator, wrote that “whatever the legal and political arguments surrounding Khan’s case, the basic decency of ensuring a court‑ordered medical process is actually completed is not, in our view, a controversial request.”
Previous signatories included England’s Michael Atherton, Mike Brearley, Nasser Hussain, Andrew Strauss and David Gower, as well as India’s Kapil Dev and Dilip Vengsarkar, and Australians Belinda Clark, Adam Gilchrist, Steve Waugh and Kim Hughes.
Khan’s lawyer has claimed that his client’s remaining vision is only 15 percent in the affected eye, a figure that has not been acted upon by prison authorities. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has directed the government to transfer Khan to a private hospital for examination by his physicians, but he was instead seen by doctors at a state‑run hospital in Islamabad where he was deemed “medically fit” before being returned to prison.
The captains’ plea underscores a broader struggle for humane treatment and proper medical care for prisoners, with their shared bond across cricket rivalries transcending political and national disputes.
