He's alive. No, he's dead. Wait, he's alive again!

You may have read about the Lebanese singer who was murdered here in Dubai a few weeks ago. It was apparently a contract killing and the authorities tracked the hitman (supposedly hired by a "local businessman" for a fee of a million dirham) to Egypt and arrested him. A couple of days later the papers here were telling us that the hitman was dead as either (a) he'd been found hanging in his police cell or (b) he'd died in hospital after suffering a heart attack (it would be so easy to mix those two up and the confusion is easy to understand - this is Dubai after all). But now, hallelujah, today the papers say that in fact he's alive again.

Now I can undersand confusion about the name of the suspect or his nationality but when it comes to being alive or dead I wouldn't have thought there was much room for doubt. I've always understood that a person is either one or the other, there's no middle ground, you can't be "a little bit dead" like you can't be "a little bit pregnant". Who knows? maybe tomorrow he'll be dead again.