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Conflicting reports about the death of political leader Benazir Bhutto have people wondering about the Pakistani equivalent of a second gunman on the grassy knoll.
The government version yesterday is stirring up accusations that the Pakistani government didn’t have enough security. The following have been offered as explanations of how she died.
Shot by gunman
It was initially reported a rooftop sniper fired bullets at her car before a second assailant blew himself up about 50 metres down the road, a theory given by senior Pakistan Peoples Party officials.
Photo published in Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad
Authorities said later Thursday that Bhutto died from bullet wounds fired by a young man in the crowd surrounding her vehicle, who then blew himself up.
[ VIDEO ]
KARACHI – October 19, 2007 – According to news reports, as dusk gave way to night, the street lights that should have illuminated the route Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming cavalcade was inching along failed to do their job. Yet house lights went on as usual in the same sector.
Those with Motive Abound
Without having access to any special information, I’d vote for the latter: sabotage by those who fear Benazir Bhutto’s return to politics. The Islamic parties have had it easy over the past few years. Because no organized secular political opposition to military rule was allowed, Islamists took advantage of the vacuum; they achieved a degree of power never possible when they had to contest elections against parties like the Pakistan People’s Party and the real Muslim League. Benazir’s return changes the equation. The Islamists lose their free ride.
KARACHI (The Guardian) Oct. 23, 2007 – Former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has accused the Pakistani government of staging a cover-up after it refused her request for British and American experts to join the inquiry into last week’s suicide bombing, writes the Guardian. “It’s simply not right that attempts should be made to cover up an assassination attempt … Obviously some people are being protected,” she said.
- Retired Brigadier Ejaz Shah, according to Raman, also played an active role in the campaign to discredit Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Caudhury after he started calling for the files of a large number of missing persons who were taken into custody by the police and the intelligence agencies.
From the website of Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party:
[Emergency] The NAB Diaries – Part One and Part Two
By Amer Nazir – December 14, 2007 – For the non-Pakistanis, NAB is the acronym for The National Accountability Bureau. The flag ship of Musharraf. The main reason he gave for assuming power. He said that the nation had become too corrupt. NAB is composed of serving and retired army officers with unlimited powers. They are answerable to none. Present in every major city, each NAB office has a jail within its compound where prisoners are kept without any possibilities of bail. Some of them picked up from the streets, most from their beds at dawn. Several have died during interrogations …
Benazir points at Pervaiz Elahi, Ejaz Shah, Afzal, Hameed Gul as threat
Wednesday, 24 October 2007 KARACHI: Chairperson Pakistan Peoples Party Benazir Bhutto, in a letter addressed to the president, has written about attack on her life, sources said. In the letter she has pointed at the Chief Miniser of Punjab Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, DG IB Ejaz Shah, former director National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Waseem Afzal and former ISI chief Gen. (Rtd) Hameed Gul as conspirators. The PPP chairperson while expressing her reservations in the letter wrote that her life was in danger from Pervaiz Elahi, Brig. (Rtd) Ejaz Shah and Gen. Hameed Gul.
In the late 1980s, Pakistani President Benazir Bhutto, feeling the mujaheddin network has grown too strong, tells President George H. W. Bush, “You are creating a Frankenstein.” However, the warning goes unheeded.
[Newsweek, 10/1/2001]
The other candidate …
In October 1990, Nawaz Sharif is running for election to replace Benazir Bhutto as the prime minister of Pakistan. According to a senior Pakistani intelligence source, bin Laden passes a considerable amount of money to Sharif and his party, since Sharif promises to introduce a hard-line Islamic government. Bin Laden has been supporting Sharif for several years.
Nawaz Sharif
Under the dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s the ISI really flowered as a kind of `state within a state’. It played a key role in manipulating the domestic political process to the disadvantage of Zia’s main political opponents: the Bhutto family and the Pakistani People’s Party. The ISI forged a close alliance with the US Central Intelligence Agency, whether in dealing with domestic leftists or – particularly – the Russians in Afghanistan. The main goal was to arm the Afghan resistance and bid up the cost of Russian intervention. It was an odd combination of Pakistani barracks nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism and US imperial might. Authoritarianism was the glue that held this disparate group together and the ISI was its main instrument. Although not without its tensions, this alliance held until the attacks of 11 September 2001, when it fell spectacularly apart.
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Afghan resistance
The 1983 suggestion of American Ambassador to Pakistan Ronald Spiers, that the U.S. provide Stingers to the mujahidin accordingly went nowhere for several years. Much of the resistance to the supply of Stinger missiles was generated internally from the CIA station chief’s desire (prior to the accession of Milt Bearden to the post) to keep the covert assistance program small and inconspicuous. Instead, the millions appropriated went to purchase Chinese, Warsaw Pact, and Israeli weaponry. Only in March 1985, did Reagan’s national security team formally decide to switch their strategy from mere harassment of Soviet forces in Afghanistan to driving the Red Army completely out of the country. After vigorous internal debate, Reagan’s military and national security advisors agreed to provide the mujahidin with the Stinger anti-aircraft missile.
● Nuclear Spy AQ Khan – CIA/America Refused Arrest in 1975 & 1985 ◊ by Oui
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Take the approval ratings. President Musharraf, 38 percent. Osama bin Laden, 46 percent. That’s right. Nearly half of Pakistanis on the front line of the war on terror favor Osama bin Laden over their own president. And in the northwest frontier province, where bin Laden is likely hiding, he enjoys a 70 percent approval rating.
2001 – Gallup Pakistan Poll
Rawalpindi is a city near the Northern Frontier with much support for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
≈ Cross-posted from my diary — After Bhutto, A Nation in Crisis ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
By attacking the remarks of Senator Barack Obama’s spokesman David Axelrod , the candidates with “foreign policy experience” assume the American masses are just plain stupid. The White House administrations of Bush I – Clinton I – Bush II, have led US foreign policy in the Middle to complete failure.
The Al Qaeda terror groups on the border of Northern Pakistan with Afghanistan have had a free ride. Osama Bin Laden is not being pursued, although from present intelligence he has been established in the Kunar mountains in this region. The Taliban has strenghtened itself while the US forces were pulled out of Afghanistan to fought a proxy war against dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq, a known enemy of Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.
The United Kingdom under the leadership of Tony Blair as prime minister, followed Bush II into Iraq, similar to PM Margaret Thatcher and Bush II leading forces into the Gulf War from the soil of Saudi Arabia, a sacred nation to the Muslim faith. US foreign policy failures has strenghtened the extreme islamists. The madrasses in Pakistan are funded by Saudi Arabia, as they have been during the past decades. The attacks in London and Glasgow were initiated by UK nationals trained in Pakistan. The blowback of UK failed policy has been thoroughly researched.
Why do the Hillary Clinton supporters on the Left Blogs attack the less “experienced” candidates, not living as many years within the Washington Beltway?
I’ve stated in the past, the American people cannot afford more of the same, it’s time for change NOW!
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
NAUDERO, Pakistan – Pakistan’s ruling party announced that Jan. 8 elections may be delayed up to four months because of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, while the opposition leader’s supporters debated who should succeed her and whether to take part in the vote.
As political maneuvering in the wake of Bhutto’s death picked up pace, another key opposition party said it would reverse an earlier decision to boycott the vote if Bhutto’s group decided to run.
“We will definitely contest the elections if the PPP decides to contest,” said Sadiq ul-Farooq, a senior member of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif‘s Pakistan Muslim League-N party.
Bhutto’s slaying last Thursday plunged the nuclear-armed country into a political crisis and triggered nationwide riots that left at least 44 people dead ahead of the parliamentary polls, seen by the United States and other Western nations as key to promoting stability in the country.
Controversy remained about whether she was killed by gunshots, a shrapnel wound or the concussive force of the blast.
She was buried without an autopsy and the debate over her cause of death undermined confidence in the government and further angered her followers, many of whom believe elements within President Pervez Musharraf’s administration played a role in the killing.
Tariq Azim, information secretary of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, said the parliamentary elections would lose credibility if it they are held on Jan. 8, with Bhutto’s party in mourning and other opposition groups intent on boycotting. He expected authorities to announce a delay within 24 hours.
“Failed state” Pakistan raises nuclear threat
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
LAHORE, Pakistan (IHT) 1 minute ago – Pakistani and Western security experts said they believed the government’s insistence that Bhutto was not killed by a bullet was designed to deflect attention from the lack of government security around Bhutto’s vehicle as she left the park in the city where the Pakistani Army keeps its headquarters, and where the powerful Inter Services Intelligence agency has a strong presence, Pakistani and Western security experts said.
Dr. Mohammad Mussadiq Khan, the principal professor of surgery at the hospital, said on the night of her death that Bhutto had died of a bullet wound, according to the account of Athar Minallah, the board member of the Rawalpindi General Hospital.
Minallah released the medical report written by Khan and six other doctors together with an open letter supporting the doctors in their call for an autopsy.
The report did not mention a bullet because the actual cause of the head injury was left to the autopsy required under Pakistani law when a person dies under suspicious or criminal circumstances, Minallah said.
The report said the doctors had tried for 41 minutes to revive her. It said “the patient was pulseless and was not breathing” when she arrived at the hospital.
“A wound was present on the right temporoparietal region through which blood was trickling down, and whitish material which looked like brain matter was visible in the wound,” it said.
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As the government’s explanation raised questions, new images of the apparent assassin, dressed in a sleeveless black waistcoat and wearing rimless sunglasses, were splashed across the front pages of Pakistan’s Sunday papers.
The man with the gun who is seen opening fire on Bhutto just a few meters from her wears a short haircut reminiscent of plainclothes intelligence officials. He is seen standing in front of a man whose head is covered in a shawl in the style of Pashtun men from the Pakistani tribal areas where Al Qaeda has strongholds. He is described in the newspaper, Dawn, as the suicide bomber who detonated a bomb after the shots were fired.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
NAUDERO, Pakistan (AFP) – Slain Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto’s son Bilawal on Sunday was named chairman of her party, with her husband named co-chairman, two top party officials told AFP.
The officials confirmed that the 19-year-old Bilawal would take over the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), the largest party in the nuclear-armed Islamic nation.
“Bilawal is the new chairman of the party and Asif Ali Zardari will assist him as co-chairman,” one of the officials said.
Pakistani media picked out two suspected attackers,one of whom apparently raised a gun (bottom) (BBC News)
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Professor Juan Cole:
“Those with Motive Abound”
Indeed.
A profile of the clan – New York Times’ Special Report, (1998). (h/t: via world affairs)
“House of Graft – Tracing the Bhutto Millions”
Those with Motive Abound
And that’s about the only thing one can be sure of in this situation.