PTI marchers leave Lakki Marwat for Islamabad after talks on access to Khan fail

About 5,000 supporters of Imran Khan left Lakki Marwat on Sunday and paused overnight, with the march due to resume on Monday, the BBC and party organisers said. The column is calling for the release of the 74-year-old former prime minister. Lakki Marwat sits about 275 kilometres, or 170 miles, from Islamabad. Sohail Afridi, chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, said he expected the march to reach a town about 80 kilometres west of the capital by Thursday.

The immediate cause is a failed round of talks. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf said the government rejected its request for access to Khan so that party leaders could consult him on national and political questions. Without that meeting, the party said, there was nothing left to negotiate. Authorities have answered the column with shipping containers stacked on key roads into Islamabad. The organisers have not announced that the destination is the capital itself. The containers are the government's reading of the route.

Afridi governs the province the march is crossing. His line on Sunday was that the movement would reach every corner of the country and that every square would become a centre of activity. He asked people to take part in the political process. That is a provincial chief minister describing a street column aimed at a federal jail, not a statement from the interior ministry. The federal government has not published a figure for the crowd, a list of closed roads, or a name for the officer in charge of the container line. The visible fact is the containers. The party's visible fact is the red and green flags in Lakki Marwat.

Khan has been in prison since 2023 on a set of cases his party calls political and the government calls criminal. His wife, Bushra Bibi, was jailed with him last year. Concern about his health has grown in recent months, which is the reason party leaders give for wanting a meeting inside the jail before they talk to the government. The government has not granted that meeting. Previous demonstrations for his release have ended in clashes and arrests. The Sunday start was smaller than the largest of those earlier marches, and it began far from Islamabad, which gives both sides several days of road before any confrontation at the container line.

The distance is the tactical fact. Two hundred and seventy-five kilometres is more than a one-day walk. A column that pauses at night and aims to be 80 kilometres from the capital by Thursday is moving at a provincial pace, not a dash. That pace lets PTI add people in districts it governs. It also lets the interior ministry choose where the containers sit. A march that has not named Islamabad as the endpoint can still be stopped on the roads that lead there. Afridi's Thursday marker, a town 80 kilometres west, is the point at which the column would be close enough for the capital's blockades to matter.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is the party's remaining seat of government. Afridi's presence at the head of the political message ties a provincial administration to a federal protest. That split is the argument of the next four days. A chief minister can urge people into the squares. He cannot open a jail in Rawalpindi or Islamabad. The federal authority that can open the jail has refused the consultation meeting that PTI set as the condition for talks. The march is what the party does with that refusal.

The health question is the part of the dispute that is not about the route. Party leaders say they need to see Khan before they can speak for him on national issues. The government has treated access as a privilege it can withhold. No independent medical report was released with the march announcement. The column is therefore walking on a claim about a prisoner that the public cannot check against a current hospital note. That gap is useful to both sides. PTI can say the government is hiding his condition. The government can say the party is using health as a mobilising line. Neither claim was settled in Lakki Marwat.

By Thursday, if Afridi's timetable holds, the column will be a short drive from the container line. The organisers can stop at the town he named, or they can turn toward the capital and meet the blockades. The government can keep the containers in place, or it can offer the jail visit that the talks failed on. The 5,000 who left on Sunday are the starting number, not the number that will matter at the edge of Islamabad.