Police in Uzbekistan are reportedly on the hunt for people that they say spread unfounded rumors about the recent death of President Islam Karimov. 



Russian news agency RIA Novosti cited Interior Ministry sources on September 9 as saying that they are looking for anybody that spread the gossip through social media, phone messaging apps and internet telephony services.



The witch-hunt is confounding even by Uzbekistan’s standards since most people, including the government in Tashkent, now agree that Karimov is indeed no longer alive. But the issue appears specifically to be all about the date on which the late president passed.



RIA Novosti’s source is cited as saying that the police are looking for “those social media users that spread the untrue information about Karimov’s date of death and that spread panic about a possible worsening of the country’s socio-political situation.”



RFE/RL’s Uzbek service, Ozodlik, said 12 people had been detained in the Namangan region for sharing news about Karimov’s presumed death through the Telegram and WhatsApp messaging services.



Ozodlik reported that middle school pupils and students at colleges in Tashkent and in the regions are now being forced to delete messaging apps from their phones for fear of more rumor-sharing.



What is particularly perverse about this frenzy of policing is that all evidence points to the fact that Karimov was indeed to all intents and purposes more dead than alive for days before his passing was announced, on September 2. As commentators have noted, the government did more to threaten stability by refusing to provide reassuring clarity about the situation than any social media user could have done.



Finnish neurosurgeon Juha Hernesniemi, who was part of an international team of doctors that struggled to save Karimov, told his country’s national broadcaster Yleisradio Oy that the president was in effect “brain dead” soon after he was hospitalized. The stroke that felled Karimov is understood to have occurred on August 27.