Bhutto assassination tied more closely to Musharraf.

As more details are revealed about the assassination of Benizar Bhutto, it becomes clearer that it was an elaborately planned and well-executed operation involving a large group of people, inside knowledge of Bhutto's anticipated movements and sloppy security conducted by the Pakistan Peoples Party. McClatchy Newspapers provides a more detailed report on what has been learned.

By Saeed Shah and Jonathan S. Landay
McClatchy Newspapers

The assassination
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Two new reports on the assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto on Dec. 27 suggest that it may have been an ambitious plot rather than an isolated act of violence and that the government of President Pervez Musharraf knows far more than it's admitted.

A police officer who witnessed the assassination said a mysterious crowd stopped Bhutto's car that day, prompting her to emerge through the sunroof. And a document has surfaced in the Pakistani news media that contradicts the government's version of her death and contains details on the pistol and the suicide bomb used.

The witness was Ishtiaq Hussain Shah, deputy superintendent of the Rawalpindi police. As Bhutto's car headed onto Liaquat Road after an election rally in Rawalpindi, a crowd appeared from nowhere and stopped the motorcade, shouting slogans of her Pakistan Peoples Party and waving party banners, according to his account.

Bhutto emerged through the sunroof of the bulletproof car to wave.

Shah's job was to clear the way for the motorcade. But 10 feet from where he was standing, a man in the crowd wearing a jacket and sunglasses raised his arm and shot at Bhutto. "I jumped to overpower him," he said later. "A mighty explosion took place soon afterwards."

Shah suffered multiple injuries and is recuperating in a Rawalpindi military hospital, guarded by agents of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate.

Who organized the crowd is still a mystery. "I don't know who they were or from where they came," Shah told the Dawn newspaper. "They just appeared on the road."

The investigation
The second report emerged in the Pakistani media, with detailed information about the pistol and bomb. It rejects the government's conclusion that Bhutto died when the force of the suicide blast threw her head against the sunroof lever of her car. Such an impact couldn't have fractured her skull, it said. The government would not confirm the report's authenticity, but a security official verified it to McClatchy. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity.

According to the report, which the paper described as a "top agency" preliminary report, a Chinese Norinco pistol, lot number 311-90, was recovered from the scene. An MUV-2 triggering mechanism for the bomb was also found; the same kind of mechanism, with the same lot number and factory code, had been used in 15 previous suicide bombings in Pakistan. [Snip]

Bhutto's Security
Bhutto's own private-security arrangements seemed poor, chaotic and amateurish. Armored cars are not fitted with sunroofs. Hers was modified in Karachi against all safety advice, according to a security company that operates in that city but spoke only on condition of anonymity. After Bhutto's death, her husband made the startling revelation that she'd been guarded by men he'd met in prison.

Government involvement before and after
Although she had escaped a suicide bombing attack Oct. 18, the day she returned to Pakistan from self-imposed exile, there was no security cordon around Bhutto as she left the park in Rawalpindi. The crime scene was cleared immediately and hosed down, destroying vital evidence. Doctors at the hospital where she was taken announced the night it happened that she'd died of bullet wounds to the head and neck, but they changed their story the next day. There was no autopsy.
[Titles added - Editor WTF-o]

Even if Musharaff did not himself direct the assassination, it is clear that he and his government do not want the details of how it was conducted to be provided to the public or to the international community.

The two biggest questions right now are how much longer Musharaff will be President, and who will replace him.

Musharraf not expected to last in office

Juan Cole provides further insight on the situation in Pakistan.

The government stonewalling on the issue of an autopsy and the coercion of government employees to toe a pre-determined line, smells to high heaven of complicity. It could be incompetence or stupidity, of course. And the Pakistani military is not all one thing. There is the Inter-Services Intelligence, some members of whom have long ties to Muslim militants. There is the officer corps, etc.

Three further notes: The Pakistan People's Party members and other opponents of Musharraf already were thinking like this before circumstantial evidence emerged that made it even more plausible. I fear their conviction will now be unshakeable, which does not bode well for social peace. It would be a feud.

Second, the physicians would not have had their lawyer speak out about their having been coerced by the military if they thought that Musharraf was likely to continue in office. That is, they have made a bet on a PPP prime minister and are more afraid of being punished by the new government than they are of being punished by the old one. Do they think the old one is about to be overthrown?

And, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, head of the Muslim League (N), called Monday for Musharraf to resign, saying of him, "He is a one-man calamity and the source of all the problems. The country is burning."

Dr. Cole makes a lot of sense here. I find his second point especially compelling. The Doctors really wouldn't have released that statement if they thought Musharraf was likely to last in office.

Apparently Dr. Cole was unaware of the story of that Bhutto was going to meet with Sen. Specter and Rep. Kennedy about the fixed election. Whether true or not, that story will also fit into Dr. Cole's first point. The members of the PPP are not going to believe anything the government says. Either Musharraf resigns or Pakistan is headed towards severe instability, even civil war.

Bhutto assassinated just before revealing the election was fixed

It hadn't seemed reasonable that Musharraf would arrange for Benazir Bhutto's assassination. When it happened, he was going to take the blame, and there did not seem to be enough reason for him to walk into that firestorm. That is no longer true. There was a reason he needed her dead and needed her dead when she was killed. McClatchy News has the story.

NAUDERO, Pakistan — The day she was assassinated last Thursday, Benazir Bhutto had planned to reveal new evidence alleging the involvement of Pakistan's intelligence agencies in rigging the country's upcoming elections, an aide said Monday.

Bhutto had been due to meet U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to hand over a report charging that the military Inter-Services Intelligence agency was planning to fix the polls in the favor of President Pervez Musharraf.

Safraz Khan Lashari, a member of the Pakistan People's Party election monitoring unit, said the report was "very sensitive" and that the party wanted to initially share it with trusted American politicians rather than the Bush administration, which is seen here as strongly backing Musharraf.

"It was compiled from sources within the (intelligence) services who were working directly with Benazir Bhutto," Lashari said, speaking Monday at Bhutto's house in her ancestral village of Naudero, where her husband and children continued to mourn her death.

The ISI had no official comment. However, an agency official, speaking only on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak on the subject, dismissed the allegations as "a lot of talk but not much substance." [Snip]

According to Lashari, the document includes information on a "safe house" allegedly being run by the ISI in a central neighborhood of Islamabad, the alleged headquarters of the rigging operation.

It names as the head of the unit a brigadier general recently retired from the ISI, who was secretly assigned to run the rigging operation, Lashari said. It charges that he was working in tandem with the head of a civilian intelligence agency. Before her return to Pakistan, Bhutto, in a letter to Musharraf, had named the intelligence official as one of the men she accused of plotting to kill her.

Lashari said the report claimed that U.S. aid money was being used to fix the elections. Ballots stamped in favor of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, which supports Musharraf, were to be produced by the intelligence agencies in about 100 parliamentary constituencies.

"They diverted money from aid activities. We had evidence of where they were spending the money," Lashari said.

Lashari, who formerly taught environmental economics at Britain's Cranfield University, said the effort was directed at constituencies where the result was likely to be decided by a small margin, so it wouldn't be obvious.

Sen. Specter and Rep. Kennedy need to be put on record regarding whether they had planned to meet with Bhutto and when.

Musharraf will not be believed now no matter what he says or does. Also, Bush had placed everything America had behind him in support of the General, and now that policy has been demonstrated to be utterly ridiculous. So not only is Pakistan a lot more unstable than it was a week ago, the assassination is clearly going to have repercussions here in the U.S. also.

There will be more about the assassination and it looks like it will be sooner rather than later.

More on the Bhutto assassination cover up

Today the New York Times provide more information on the cover up about how Benazir Bhutto was killed.

Athar Minallah, a board member of the hospital where Ms. Bhutto was treated, released her medical report along with an open letter showing that her doctors wanted to distance themselves from the government theory that Ms. Bhutto had died by hitting her head on a lever of her car’s sunroof during the attack.

In his letter, Mr. Minallah, who is also a prominent lawyer, said the doctors believed that an autopsy was needed to provide the answers to how she actually died. Their request for one last Thursday was denied by the local police chief.

Pakistani and Western security experts said the government’s insistence that Ms. Bhutto, a former prime minister, was not killed by a bullet was intended to deflect attention from the lack of government security around her. On Sunday, Pakistani newspapers covered their front pages with photographs showing a man apparently pointing a gun at her from just yards away.

Her vehicle came under attack by a gunman and suicide bomber as she left a political rally in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani Army keeps its headquarters, and where the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency has a strong presence.

The government’s explanation, that Ms. Bhutto died after hitting her head as she ducked from the gunfire or was tossed by the force of the suicide blast, has been greeted with disbelief by her supporters, ordinary Pakistanis and medical experts. While some of the mystery could be cleared up by exhuming the body, it is not clear whether Ms. Bhutto’s family would give permission, such is their distrust of the government.

Mr. Minallah distributed the medical report with his open letter to the Pakistani news media and The New York Times. He said the doctor who wrote the report, Mohammad Mussadiq Khan, the principal professor of surgery at the Rawalpindi General Hospital, told him on the night of Ms. Bhutto’s death that she had died of a bullet wound.
[Highlighting mine - Ed. WTF-o]

This is further confirmation of BBC's channel 4 news on which I based last nights' post Bhutto was shot - Musharaff's government is lying.

It is interesting that it was the Chief of Police who would not permit an autopsy. This, combined with the complaints made by Bhutto's security chief before her assassination that on three different occasions the police had provided faulty cell phone jammers to her security contingent Makes you wonder who in the government was responsible for Ms. Bhutto;s assassination. Were the security guards who did nothing to prevent the assassination (see the video in yesterday's post ) provided by the police? And why did Musharraf refuse to permit the PPP to hire American or British security guards?

As more information becomes available, it seems very likely that the assassination was conducted by someone in the Pakistani government, and less likely that it was outside terrorists.

Bhutto was shot - Musharaff's government is lying

Here is a U-Tube version of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

• Three gunshots before the bomb went off.


• The shooter walked right up behind the SUV, although there were three security guards there.


• The bomber was also right next to the car, in spite of the security guards.


• The reporter states that Bhutto had asked for American or British security guards, but Musharraf refused to let her use them.


• The early reports from the hospital all state the Bhutto had been shot at least twice. Then, suddenly, the hospital changed its story to the strange story that Ms. Bhutto fell against a latch for the sunroof when the bomb went off. However, this video clearly shows that she fell inside the car before the explosion.


• There was also no blood on the latch against which she was said to have struck her head.


• Rawalpindi, the city in which Bhutto was assassinated, is the headquarters of the Pakistani Army and is considered a garrison city.


• Musharraf was, until forced to resign to remain President a very short time ago, the Chief of Staff of the Army.

The government is clearly concealing something that would embarrass them. Is it that Musharraf called for Bhutto's assassination himself, or is it that someone in the Pakistani Army went behind his back and conducted the assassination?

It seems to me that the second choice would call for a scapegoat criminal to be caught and killed, rather than the strange lies that the government has been telling.

There is sure to be more coming out. At the very least, no one in Pakistan is going to believe anything Musharraf or his government says. That will require his replacement or a really sharp crackdown by Musharraf. In either case, his government has no remaining credibility.

That's what it looks like to me as a distant outsider. If someone who has further facts has a different read on the story, I will be very interested in hearing it.

So who is suspected in Bhutto's assassination?

Jeremy Page, South Asia Correspondent for the Times online reviews who the most probable suspects are:

The main suspects in Benazir Bhutto’s assassination are the Pakistani and foreign Islamist militants who saw her as a heretic and an American stooge and had repeatedly threatened to kill her.

But fingers will also be pointed at Inter-Services Intelligence, the agency that has had close ties to the Islamists since the 1970s and has been used by successive Pakistani leaders to suppress political opposition.

Those are the groups. Page goes on to name likely individuals:

Earlier that month, [October] two militant warlords based in Pakistan's lawless northwestern areas, near the border with Afghanistan, had threatened to kill her on her return.

One was Baitullah Mehsud, a top commander fighting the Pakistani army in the tribal region of South Waziristan. He has close ties to al Qaeda and the Afghan Taleban.

The other was Haji Omar, the “amir” or leader of the Pakistani Taleban, who is also from South Waziristan and fought against the Soviets with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

After that attack Ms Bhutto revealed that she had received a letter signed by a person who claimed to be a friend of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden threatening to slaughter her like a goat. [Snip]

Analysts say that President Musharraf himself is unlikely to have ordered her assassination, but that elements of the army and intelligence service would have stood to lose money and power if she had become Prime Minister.

The ISI, in particular, includes some Islamists who became radicalised while running the American-funded campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan and remained fiercely opposed to Ms Bhutto on principle.

Saudi Arabia, which has strong influence in Pakistan, is also thought to frown on Ms Bhutto as being too secular and Westernised and to favour Nawaz Sharif, another former Prime Minister.

President Musharraf is going to have to quickly act to prevent Pakistan from devolving into Civil War. This action is also going to have severe effects on the legitimacy and public acceptance of the government formed after the January 8 election - assuming that the election is held at all.

Pakistan has just joined Afghanistan and Iraq as nations in real trouble internally.

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Addendum 11:11 AM CST
Aryn Baker of Time Magazine reports:

Just days before parliamentary polls in Pakistan, leading Prime Ministerial contender and anti terrorism crusader Benazir Bhutto was shot dead during an election rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, near Islamabad. "She has been martyred," said party official Rehman Malik. The Associated Press, citing Malik, reported that Bhutto was shot in the neck and the chest before the gunman blew himself up. At least 20 bystanders were killed in the blast. Bhutto was rushed to a hospital But, at 6:16 p.m. Pakistan time, she was declared dead.

So this was not just a bombing. It was an assassination with more than one method of killing Ms. Bhutto planned and executed.

Who was close enough to shoot her in the back of the head?

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Addendum 2 11:24 AM CST
From the Guardian we get some further reports of how Benazir Bhutto was assassinated:

Bhutto was killed as her jeep pulled away from an election rally in Rawalpindi. Standing up in an open-top jeep, she presented a clear target.

Eyewitnesses spoke of hearing gunshots followed by a bomb blast. Bhutto's security adviser, Rehman Malik, said the former PM was shot in the chest and neck. Conflicting reports from Pakistan's interior ministry said Bhutto was killed by the suicide bomber's collision with her jeep. [Snip]

Malik, Bhutto's security adviser, questioned the adequacy of protection for Bhutto.

"We repeatedly informed the government to provide her proper security and appropriate equipment including jammers, but they paid no heed to our requests," he said. [Snip]

It appears the Musharraf government had been considering ways to strengthen her security, and it forced Bhutto's PPP to cancel a rally in Rawalpindi in November due to security fears.

Today's Rawalpindi rally only went ahead after hundreds of riot police had set up security checkpoints. Rawalpindi is a so-called garrison city and popularly regarded as one of the most secure cities in Pakistan.

The Hindu reports that Bhutto's security chief, Malik, had complained prefiously that the government provided faulty radion jammers on at least three occasions.

Rehman Malik, a Pakistan People's Party (PPP) leader and Security Advisor to Bhutto, asked the Interior Ministry to provide "fault-free jammers along with a technician to ensure full protection" to her from any attempted attack.

This is the third time that the PPP has complained to the Interior Ministry about jammers provided to Bhutto being faulty. Bhutto survived a suicide bomb attack on her homecoming rally in Karachi on October 18 that killed 140 people.

In his letter to the Interior Secretary, Malik, a former Federal Investigation Agency chief, said: "I regret to inform that the jammers provided by Sindh Police to cover the movements of Benazir Bhutto on 23-12-2007 did not work, which is a serious lapse in the light of the serious security threat already conveyed to us by Brig Javed Iqbal Cheema, Director General, National Crisis Management Cell, Ministry of Interior."

"Similarly, the jammers provided for the protection of Benazir Bhutto during her trip to Rahimyar Khan on 24-12-2007 also failed to work, exposing (her) to a high risk."

Malik said the PPP had "made repeated requests for provision of proper fault-free jammers for the protection of Benazir Bhutto but in every trip the jammers have failed to work."

Jammers should make it more difficult for assassins to know where the target is. In this case it looks like both a gunman and a bomber knew where Benazir Bhurro was. If the police have failed three times to deliver working jammers, then the police appear implicated. Whoever ran security for the government should not have let that happen a second time unless he was complicit in this assassination.

If Rawalpindi, Pakistan, is considered a Garrison City and is the headquarters of the Army, then suspicion must also be directed at the Pakistani Army.

Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto assassinated today

Benazir Bhutto, one of three candidates running for the post of President of Pakistan in the election to be held January 8, was assassinated by a bomber in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. She died in the hospital a little over two hours ago at 6:16 PM PKT.

See MSNBC for details. See also this Associated Press report.