Ailing Imran Khan briefly spirited from prison for treatment

PL reports on concerns for the life of Pakistan's most loved former cricketer

A brief video arrived from Pakistan this morning. In it, somebody in a moving vehicle has captured a line of black SUV vans and security vehicles travelling, under cover of dark, in the opposite direction. It is, the sender informs us, Imran Khan, briefly freed from solitary confinement and on his way to a Pakistan medical centre for an injection to treat a condition that’s caused the 73-year-old to lose almost all the sight in one eye.

Two journalists who tracked the convoy of what they estimated to be 10 to 15 vehicles operating in the “dead of night” were travelling at speeds of around 150 km/h as they spirited the former Prime Minister along the Islamabad Expressway that connects the Rawalpindi jail to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, some 35 km away in Islamabad.

Imran is unseen in the footage, as he has been for some time now, erased from public view by the forces that deposed and then detained him.

Officials assured the press, whose ability to report on the subject has been seriously curtailed, that the furtive excursion was the second of three such visits for the series of injections. The former captain and Prime Minister, they claimed, also had his health checked by a number of specialists.

The process at the medical centre took an hour.

From footage allegedly of Imran Khan being spirited from jail for a brief medical check.

After the visit, Imran was returned to the eight-foot-by-six-foot cell at Rawalpindi’s infamous Adiala Jail, where he spends his days alone, without books, newspapers or voice. His wife, Bushra Bibi, is imprisoned elsewhere.