Pakistan’s jailed former prime minister, Imran Khan, is set to undergo eye surgery for the second time in a month, a government official said on Saturday, responding to growing concerns over Mr. Khan’s health after a lawyer’s report claimed he had lost 85 percent of the vision in his right eye because of delayed treatment.
“Further check up and treatment will be done in a specialized medical facility by the best eye specialists,” Pakistan’s information minister, Attaullah Tarar, said in a post on X. “A detailed report thereof will also be submitted in the Supreme Court.”
Mr. Khan, 73, underwent surgery in late January to remove a blood clot that was impairing the vision in his right eye. But Mr. Khan’s sister, Aleema Khan, said in text messages that Mr. Khan’s doctors, who have not been allowed to examine him, were concerned that there could be an underlying problem beyond the blood clot.
Mr. Khan’s condition became a political flashpoint this week after a lawyer from his party argued in a report that the impairment had worsened because of inaction by the prison authorities.
The lawyer, Salman Safdar, from the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, commonly called P.T.I., wrote that Mr. Khan had begun experiencing “persistent blurred and hazy vision” last October.
He “appeared visibly perturbed and deeply distressed by the loss of vision and the absence of timely and specialized medical intervention,” Mr. Safdar wrote in the report, made public on Thursday.
P.T.I. lawmakers and Mr. Khan’s relatives immediately accused Pakistan’s government and powerful military of purposely allowing the former prime minister’s health to deteriorate. But the report’s claims that Mr. Khan is left with 15 percent of his vision in one eye and that treatment was intentionally delayed, have yet to be confirmed by independent authorities.
Ms. Khan asserted, without providing evidence, that delayed treatment had put her brother at risk of losing vision entirely in his right eye.
“Is this an irretrievable situation? We don’t know,” Salman Akram Raja, P.T.I.’s secretary general, said on Saturday during a sit-in at the Pakistani Parliament.
On Friday, Rana Sanaullah, a special assistant to the current prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, rejected the claim that prison officials had ignored Mr. Khan’s eye issue since October. He said Mr. Khan had first alerted them to the problem in early January, and that doctors were examining him every two days.
Mr. Khan served as Pakistan’s prime minister from 2018 to 2022 and has remained widely popular, even as he has been in jail since 2023 on various charges of corruption and revealing states secrets. Mr. Khan has denied all the charges and has been acquitted in some cases.
In December, he and his wife were given sentences of 17 years after a court found them guilty of illegally retaining and selling state gifts.
Mr. Khan is being held in Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi, a city on the outskirts of the capital, Islamabad, that houses the military’s headquarters.
The Pakistani authorities have frequently prevented Mr. Khan’s family and lawyers from visiting him in prison, leading relatives and supporters to denounce his detention conditions as inhumane.
Mr. Khan’s sister, Aleema Khan, said that the family wanted him to be “seen by a specialist in an independent hospital, where they cannot manipulate the reports, in the presence of Imran Khan’s own doctors.”
It remained unclear on Saturday where, when and from whom Mr. Khan would receive the promised treatment.
Salman Masood contributed reporting.
Elian Peltier is The Times’s bureau chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan, based in Islamabad.
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