This week, Pakistan had to grapple with a question no government wants to have to answer: Was the country's biggest political prisoner still alive? The scare started with two dispatch pieces from the Emmy nominated journalist Wajahat Saeed Khan, who is based in the United States, which read that three officers linked with the army's General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi believed the former PM could have been killed within Adiala Jail premises. The news was shared by many Pakistani social media and diaspora platforms in no time, bringing a story that has been brewing for a year to the fore. On Wednesday, the Inter-Services Public Relations Directorate, the military's press arm, stated that the report was untrue. Khan himself reversed the certainty of his own report, claiming that he heard that one's sources had never confirmed a death, but only expressed concern that something must have gone awry. His final words were more than a consolation: 'I am happy the Army did respond at all', he said, 'the denial at least meant Khan was still alive to be denied about'.

That's where the problem of Pakistan's credibility is really and it's not new. Last November, as rumours about the death of the cricketer-turned-politician spread across the country, thousands of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) supporters made a pilgrimage along the gates of Adiala Jail to demand proof of life. The authorities then brushed it aside as baseless, Khan was healthy and under medical supervision and moved on. Now, 9 months later, the same story is back, with an unverified story in the Afghan media and increasingly from Khan's own family. His son Kasim, who wrote on social media, said his father had been locked up for 851 days, with the past few weeks in a “highly restricted” cell, where he was denied visits or phone calls. Khan's three sisters, Aleema, Uzma and Noreen, state that they have not been allowed to meet as stipulated in an Islamabad High Court order and that one of them reportedly got manhandled by police officers protesting outside the jail. It is not the worst case scenario that has come to pass. It is because, in a country like Pakistan it is no longer taken for granted that official reassurance is given.

The law that has been used to trap Khan inside Adiala is in itself, in its structure, extraordinary in scale. He is facing charges of up to 150 offences which include corruption, breach of official secrets, incitement and terrorism-related offences related to the riots that erupted after his first arrest in May 2023. He was given 14 years for the Al-Qadir Trust case, where he is alleged to have defrauded the state of £190 million through a scheme involving state land and a charitable trust set up by his wife, Bushra Bibi, who was given seven years for the same offence. Both have appealed. Proceeding through those recent riots of the unrest in May 2023 when his supporters broke into military bases following his initial arrest, and a separate case linked to November 2024 protests. His lawyers have always insisted that the number and speed of prosecutions is less a measure of the crime and more a strategy to make sure that he doesn't have the space to fight an election again. That is utterly baseless, Pakistani authorities say, as each case has its own evidence and has traversed ordinary courts.

It is health that has brought the tale from a domestic political debate to an international dimension. It was reported earlier this year that Khan had lost sight in one eye due to delayed treatment and the Supreme Court ordered him to undergo examination by a medical board. Special Rapporteurs of the United Nations have singled out those conditions separately as having concerns of around twenty-three hours per day isolated. This year, a group of 13 members of the US congress wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to urge Washington's sharpest measures yet against Islamabad regarding the treatment of the jailed opposition leader. The pressure comes at a bad time for a government already grappling with Washington over trade and security cooperation.

It also arrives at a time when Pakistan is attempting to convey the other message of stability after years of hardship to its economy. The Karachi stock exchange's benchmark index KSE-100 traded slightly above 180,924 points this week, rising by over 23 percent year-on-year and just shy of its record high, amid waning regional tensions and better corporate performance. The steep turnaround is from a record low of 287.68 a month ago and 279.98 last year when Khan was first arrested, sending investors into record distressed territory on sovereign bonds as they priced in default risk. The country's finances are still tied up in an IMF programme and debts to the outside world are still in the tens of billions of dollars per year, although foreign reserves are still thin. Political uncertainty surrounding one man is no longer the threat to the whole system that it once was in markets. So, whether that confidence will prevail in the event of a true crisis over Khan's welfare or a rumour that's defused within 48 hours is an open question no one in Karachi wants to test.

The grievance that seems to lurk beneath the racket is a more basic one that keeps recurring on the profiles of ordinary individuals instead of official statements: If there's nothing wrong, why not let the family know and resolve the issue? Court orders already ensure visitation rights that have been ignored by jail officials, and every denial only further breeds suspicion, not a journalist's tip. The Pakistani military and civilian leadership can continue to respond in a fast way and deny any deaths after all death rumours. What they have not quite gotten around to doing is eliminating the reasons why each new rumour is possible in the first place. As long as family access, medical transparency and a credible timeline for his approximately one hundred fifty ongoing cases remain less important than the next press statement, this story will keep coming back, and with each iteration, so will the gooseflesh of doubt about the denial itself.