Benazir Bhutto Assassinated
Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto Killed in Homicide Attack at Rally in Pakistan
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a homicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally, a party aide and a military official said.’
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a homicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally.
The former prime minister died in Rawalpindi General Hospital, where she had been rushed to surgery after she was wounded in the attack.
There were reports that Bhutto had been shot in the neck as she was leaving the scene of the bombing.
“At 6:16 p.m. she expired,†said Wasif Ali Khan, a member of Bhutto’s party who was at the hospital.
Her supporters at the hospital began chanting “Dog, Musharraf, dog,†referring to Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf.
Some of them smashed the glass door at the main entrance of the emergency unit, others burst into tears. Top party leaders were outside the hospital, crying.An Associated Press reporter at the scene saw body parts and flesh scattered at the back gate of the Liaqat Bagh park in Rawalpindi, where the rally was held.
He counted about 20 bodies, including police, and could see many other wounded.
The road outside was stained with blood and people screamed for ambulances. Others gave water to the wounded lying in the street. The clothing of some of the victims was shredded and people put party flags over their bodies.The bomb went off just minutes after Bhutto spoke to thousands of supporters, and she appeared to be the target of the attack. Farahtullah Babar, the spokesman for her party, said her vehicle was about 50 yards away from blast, which went off as she was leaving the rally venue.
Bhutto served twice as Pakistan’s prime minister between 1988 and 1996. She had returned to Pakistan from an eight-year exile on Oct. 18.
Her homecoming parade in Karachi was also targeted by a suicide attacker, killing more than 140 people. On that occasion she narrowly escaped injury.
This is terrible. She worked hard to reform a country full of misogynist, Islamofascist miscreants. Pakistan has formented terrorist scumbags and extremists for years. She knew her life was in constant danger, but returned to her home and courageously stood up to subhuman filth.
To be sure, the Musharraf regime will blame the United States for brokering an agreement to let her back into Pakistan, and the moonbats on the Left will blame President Bush because everything is his fault, from their lousy childhoods to their miserable worthless adult lives.
She severed ties with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and they hated her for that. Musharraf on the other hand, has both groups running amok; terrorist camps operating within Pakistan’s borders and moles in his Intelligence Service, not to mention that BIN LADEN is still hiding there. He is no friend of the U.S.
Bhutto was no angel, but she was willing to take them on and bring some much needed change. The last thing Pakistan needs is another reason for re-instatement of martial law or to disintegrate further into a cesspool of corruption and chaos.
Musharraf is probably glad that someone finally got to her. She was the biggest threat to the oppressive, corrupt regime. No one has yet claimed responsibility for this atrocity, but Musharraf, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda head up the list.
The “peaceful practitioners of Islam†tried unsuccessfully to assassinate her numerous times before, once even using a baby:
A man had gotten close to her armored truck, the former prime minister said, and had been trying to hand across a small child as her motorcade inched through the thronged streets of Karachi. She remembers gesturing for the man to come closer.
“It was about one or two years old, and I think it was a girl,†Mrs. Bhutto recalled. “We feel it was a baby, kidnapped, and its clothes were rigged with explosives. He kept trying to hand it to people to hand to me. I’m a mother, I love babies, but the [street lights] had already gone out, and I was worried about the baby getting dropped or hurt.†She would have been dead, she said, if she had not just dipped back inside her vehicle to loosen the shoes on her swollen feet.
“The baby, the bomb, it went off only feet from me; there was nothing between us but the wall of the truck,†she said in an interview with The Washington Times on Tuesday. “We were rocking from side to side, this huge truck. We saw the bodies, the blood everywhere; we saw the carnage. Some bodies were naked, with their clothes burned off,†she said, shutting her Kohl-rimmed eyes against the vision.
More than 170 supporters were killed in coordinated blasts along the route, a horror that was carried on live television and has shaped the already tumultuous campaign season here.
Link: http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071213/FOREIGN/112140015/1001
And on one occasion, a 15 year old:
POLICE in Pakistan have stopped a 15-year-old boy they say was carrying a bomb made of dynamite and nails from getting into a rally by opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.
The boy got past the first of four security checkpoints set up outside the rally in the northwestern city of Peshawar but was caught at the second, said police officer Rahim Shah, according to the Associated Press.
In October, suicide bombers struck a parade celebrating Ms Bhutto’s return from exile, killing more than 140 people in the southern city of Karachi.
Link: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22975025-23109,00.html
Christopher Hitchens gives a balanced–good and bad–viewpoint of the life and politics of Benazir Bhutto:
Benazir saw one of her brothers, Shahnawaz, die in mysterious circumstances in the south of France in 1985, and the other, Mir Murtaza, shot down outside the family home in Karachi by uniformed police in 1996. It was at that famous address—70 Clifton Road—that I went to meet her in November 1988, on the last night of the election campaign, and I found out firsthand how brave she was. Taking the wheel of a jeep and scorning all bodyguards, she set off with me on a hair-raising tour of the Karachi slums. Every now and then, she would get out, climb on the roof of the jeep with a bullhorn, and harangue the mob that pressed in close enough to turn the vehicle over. On the following day, her Pakistan Peoples Party won in a landslide, making her, at the age of 35, the first woman to be elected the leader of a Muslim country.
Her tenure ended—as did her subsequent “comeback†tenure—in a sorry welter of corruption charges and political intrigue, and in a gilded exile in Dubai. But clearly she understood that exile would be its own form of political death. (She speaks well on this point in an excellent recent profile by Amy Wilentz in More magazine.) Like two other leading Asian politicians, Benigno Aquino of the Philippines and Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, she seems to have decided that it was essential to run the risk of returning home. And now she has gone, as she must have known she might, the way of Aquino.
Who knows who did this deed? It is grotesque, of course, that the murder should have occurred in Rawalpindi, the garrison town of the Pakistani military elite and the site of Flashman’s Hotel. It is as if she had been slain on a visit to West Point or Quantico. But it’s hard to construct any cui bono analysis on which Gen. Pervez Musharraf is the beneficiary of her death. The likeliest culprit is the al-Qaida/Taliban axis, perhaps with some assistance from its many covert and not-so-covert sympathizers in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. These were the people at whom she had been pointing the finger since the huge bomb that devastated her welcome-home motorcade on Oct. 18.
She would have been in a good position to know about this connection, because when she was prime minister, she pursued a very active pro-Taliban policy, designed to extend and entrench Pakistani control over Afghanistan and to give Pakistan strategic depth in its long confrontation with India over Kashmir.
……There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against them. She had, according to some reports, severed the connection with her rather questionable husband. She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism. Of those preparing to contest the highly dubious upcoming elections, she was the only candidate with anything approaching a mass appeal to set against the siren calls of the fundamentalists.
Expect a lot of rioting and more bombs. It won’t stop until all the muslim extremist pigs are dead, which means it won’t be any time soon.
Jonn added 12/28/2007: CNN writes that Pakistan’s Interior Ministry is reporting that Bhutto was not killed by bullets, but by bashing her head on a handle inside the car.
Category: Politics
Jonn, I don’t buy the “head hitting handle” story being told by the Pakistan government. The assassins would have had to be crappy shots.
Here’s a excerpt from a New York Sun article:
A working theory, according to this American source, is that Al Qaeda or affiliated jihadist groups had effectively suborned at least one unit of Pakistan’s Special Services Group, the country’s equivalent of Britain’s elite SAS commandos. This official, however, stressed this was just a theory at this point. Other theories include that the assassins were trained by Qaeda or were from other military services, or the possibility that the assassins were retired Pakistani special forces.
Link: http://www.nysun.com/article/68672
I smell a cover-up.
I doubt very much that Mussharaf’s government had anything to do with it – I doubt he’d find someone whacky enough to blow themselves up. It doesn’t take any amount of training (especially special forces training) to walk into a crowd and push a button. And al Qaeda gunfire is notoriously inaccurate which is why they depend on killing hundreds of innocent people with bombs.
She died as a result of the terrorist’s attack, whether bullet or bomb related. Why the Pakistan government would say “she died from a knock on the head” is ridiculous. You ought to know by now I’m no conspiracy kook, but it’s obvious who’s responsible for this assassination. Al Qaeda tops the list. Musharraf refused to provide any security for her when she returned, and had a come-what-may attitude.
He could not possibly be totally clueless when his own government and intelligence service is rife with al Qadea. At the very least, he’s complicit.