Pakistan detains Imran Khan's sister a week before PTI march on Islamabad

Police in Lahore arrested Aleema Khan, the sister of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan, on Sunday, exactly one week before his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party plans to march on Islamabad on Sept. 27 to demand his release, Al Jazeera reported.

The deputy commissioner of Lahore issued an order, a copy of which Al Jazeera said it had seen, placing her in detention for 30 days under Punjab's Maintenance of Public Order law, which permits preventive detention of anyone the authorities judge a risk to public order or safety. A notification from the city's district administration said she had been sent to jail for 30 days and gave the reasoning: "According to intelligence reports, her presence at any public place will pose a grave threat to public safety," TRT World reported.

A senior police official in Lahore, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to talk to the media, confirmed the arrest to Al Jazeera without providing further details. There was no immediate government comment on the detention itself. A day earlier, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi had pledged that the government would use every means available to prevent the PTI march, according to Reuters, cited by Al Jazeera and TRT World. The PTI protest is set to converge on the capital in the same window as the Jamaat-e-Islami train march against fuel levies, which authorities have also tried to head off.

PTI calls detention illegal

Her lawyer, Rana Mudassar Umer, wrote on X that "Aleema Khan left her home in the morning with the driver when the police illegally arrested her and took her to an unknown location." He said she had bail in all her cases in Lahore and that it was not yet known under which case, or at which police station, she was being held.

The party condemned the arrest and demanded her release. "This is not law. This is an illegal arrest. This is cowardice and a deliberate attempt to worsen the situation," PTI spokesperson Sheikh Waqas Akram posted on X. He said a woman in her 70s had been detained "from her doorstep because she refused to stay silent about her brother's illegal detention, solitary confinement, and denial of medical care." Zulfi Bukhari, a close aide to Khan, called the arrest "absolutely despicable," TRT World reported.

Health of the jailed former prime minister

Imran Khan, 73, has been in prison since August 2023 on a series of convictions his party describes as politically motivated; appeals courts have suspended or thrown out every one of them except a single case, Al Jazeera reported. Concern over his health, especially his right eye, which has needed months of specialist treatment, has become the focus of the PTI campaign. His sons, Sulaiman and Kasim Khan, recently told Al Jazeera they were increasingly worried after hearing their father was "agitated" and suffering "severe anxiety."

Last month the Supreme Court ordered the authorities to move Khan to the privately run Shifa International Hospital in Islamabad, where, according to his lawyer, he was to remain under medical care until the next hearing. Instead, officials brought him to the government-run Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences for a short examination, sent him back to prison and refused to let his own doctor see him, a sequence the party says breached the court's order.

The arrest came the same day the opposition Tehreek-i-Tahafuz-Ayin-i-Pakistan alliance formed a six-member committee, including PTI Chairman Barrister Gohar Khan and Senate opposition leader Allama Raja Nasir Abbas, to consult other parties on a proposed multi-party conference covering law and order, the economy and the creation of new provinces, Dawn reported. Gohar had announced the conference plan on Sept. 11, and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl has agreed to take part.

What it means: The 30-day preventive order shows the state using administrative detention rather than criminal charges to remove a leading figure from the streets before the march, a tool that does not depend on the outcome of her existing cases. With the interior minister publicly committed to stopping the protest and the PTI casting the arrest as proof of its grievance, both sides are escalating a week ahead of Sept. 27. The opposition's parallel push for a multi-party conference indicates the party is also seeking a broader political front, so how the government handles the march will shape whether that coalition-building gains traction.