27/12/2017
Benazir Bhutto assassination: How Pakistan covered up killing
By Owen Bennett-Jones
BBC News
Benazir Bhutto at the election campaign rally where she was killed
Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim country. The decade since an assassin killed her has revealed more about how Pakistan works than it has about who actually ordered her death.
Bhutto was murdered on 27 December 2007 by a 15-year-old suicide bomber called Bilal. She had just finished an election rally in Rawalpindi when he approached her convoy, shot at her and blew himself up. Bilal had been asked to carry out the attack by the Pakistani Taliban.
Benazir Bhutto was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's first democratically elected prime minister. His political career was also brought to a premature end when he was hanged by the military regime of General Zia-ul Haq. Benazir went on to become prime minister twice in the 1990s, but she was always distrusted by the military, which used corruption allegations to remove her from power.
At the time of her death she was making a bid for a third term as prime minister. The assassination caused widespread civil unrest in Pakistan. Bhutto's supporters took to the streets, putting up road blocks, lighting fires and chanting anti-Pakistan slogans.
Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto waves from her car just seconds before being attacked on December 27, 2007 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Image caption
The attack took place seconds after this photo was taken
The general and the 'threatening' phone call
A decade later, the general in charge of Pakistan at the time has suggested people in the establishment could have been involved in her murder.
Asked whether rogue elements within the establishment could have been in touch with the Taliban about the killing, General Pervez Musharraf replied: "Possibility. Yes indeed. Because the society is polarised on religious lines."
And, he said, those elements could have had a bearing on her death.
It's a startling statement from a former Pakistani head of state. Normally military leaders in Pakistan deny any suggestion of state complicity in violent jihadist attacks.
Pervez Musharraf denies threatening Bhutto in a phone call
Asked whether he had any specific information about rogue elements in the state being involved in the assassination, he said: "I don't have any facts available. But my assessment is very accurate I think... A lady who is in known to be inclined towards the West is seen suspiciously by those elements."
Musharraf has himself been charged with murder, criminal conspiracy for murder and facilitation for murder in relation to the Bhutto case. Prosecutors say that he phoned Benazir Bhutto in Washington on 25 September, three weeks before she ended eight years in self-imposed exile.
Long-serving Bhutto aid Mark Seighal and journalist Ron Suskind both say they were with Bhutto when the call came in. According to Seighal, immediately after the call Bhutto said: "He threatened me. He told me not to come back. He warned me not to come back.
Musharraf said he would not be responsible for what would happen to Bhutto if she returned, Seighal told the BBC. "And he said that her safety, her security was a function of her relationship with him."
Musharraf strongly denies making the call and dismisses the idea that he would have ordered her murder. "Honestly I laugh at it," he recently told the BBC. "Why would I kill her?"
The deadly plot
The legal proceedings against Musharraf have stalled because he is in self-imposed exile in Dubai. Benazir Bhutto's son and political heir, Bilawal, has rejected his denials out of hand.
"Musharraf exploited this entire situation to assassinate my mother," he said. "He purposely sabotaged her security so that she would be assassinated and taken off the scene."
Combination image created 04 January 2008 made from a footage released by Pakistani private Dawn News TV shows former premier Benazir Bhutto waving to the crowd (top) and a suspected gunner firing at her (bottom) with what appears as muzzle flash at the tip of the gun (bottom-R) during a rally in Rawalpindi 27 December 2007.
The attacker shot at her before blowing himself up
A bomb explodes next to the vehicle of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007 following a political rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Image caption
The shot at Bhutto was followed by a bomb blast, which killed her
While Musharraf's case is on hold, others have been acquitted of the crime. Within weeks of the assassination, five suspects had confessed to helping the 15-year-old Bilal assassinate Bhutto at the behest of the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The first person to be arrested, Aitzaz Shah, had been told by the Pakistan Taliban that he would be the suicide bomber chosen to kill Bhutto. Much to his annoyance he was kept in reserve in case the attempt failed.
Two others, Rasheed Ahmed and Sher Zaman, confessed they were mid-ranking organisers of the conspiracy and two Rawalpindi-based cousins, Hasnain Gul and Rafaqat Hussain, told the authorities that they provided accommodation to Bilal the night before the killing.
Even though these confessions were subsequently withdrawn, phone records showing the suspects' locations and communications in the hours before Bhutto's murder seem to corroborate them. Hasnain Gul also led the police to some physical evidence in his apartment.
DNA from Bilal's body parts gathered after his attack and tested in a US lab matched the DNA on some training shoes, cap and a shawl Bilal had left behind in Hasnain's residence when he put on his suicide vest.
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