Bhutto Assassinated in Attack on Rally
SALMAN MASOOD and CARLOTTA GALL
Salman Masood reported from Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and Carlotta Gall
from Kabul, Afghanistan. Reporting was contributed by Ismail Khan
from Peshawar, Pakistan, Mark Mazzetti from Washington, David Rohde
from New York and Jane Perlez from Sydney, Australia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/world/asia/28pakistan.html?hp


-

Benazir Bhutto
بینظیر بھٹو
Prime Minister of Pakistan
In office: 19 October 1993 – 05 November 1996
President Wasim Sajjad / Farooq Leghari
Preceded by Moeen Qureshi
Succeeded by Miraj Khalid
In office
02 December 1988 – 06 August 1990
President Ghulam Ishaq Khan
Preceded by Muhammad Khan Junejo
Succeeded by Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi
*
Born 21 June 1953(1953-06-21)
Karachi, Pakistan
Died 27 December 2007 (aged 54)
Rawalpindi, Pakistan
Political party Pakistan Peoples Party
Spouse Asif Ali Zardari
Alma mater Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, Radcliffe College, Harvard
University
Religion Islam
*
Fact Box
President George W. Bush counts Pakistan and President Musharraf as
the U.S.'s key Muslim ally in his war on terrorism
----------
Al Qaeda leaders including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed have been captured
in Pakistan
----------
Pakistani forces critical in controlling mountainous border with
Afghanistan where Taliban and al Qaeda supporters are accused of
having safe havens
----------
Instability in Pakistan could affect other regional nuclear powers,
including China and India

-


RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistani opposition
leader and twice-serving prime minister, was assassinated Thursday
evening as she left a political rally here, a scene of fiery carnage
that plunged Pakistan deeper into political turmoil and ignited
widespread violence by her enraged supporters.

Ms. Bhutto, 54, was shot in the neck or head, according to differing
accounts, as she stood in the open sunroof of a car and waved to
crowds. Seconds later a suicide attacker detonated his bomb, damaging
one of the cars in her motorcade, killing more than 20 people and
wounding 50, the Interior Ministry said.

News of her death sent angry protesters swarming the emergency ward
of the nearby hospital, where doctors declared Ms. Bhutto dead at
6:16 p.m. Supporters later jostled to carry her bare wooden coffin as
it began its journey to her hometown of Larkana, in southern
Pakistan, for burial. In Karachi and other cities, frenzied crowds
vented their rage, blocking the streets, burning tires and throwing
stones.

The death of Ms. Bhutto, leader of Pakistan's largest political
party, throws Pakistan's politics into disarray less than two weeks
before parliamentary elections scheduled for Jan. 8 and just weeks
after a state of emergency was lifted. There was immediate
speculation that elections would be postponed and another state of
emergency declared.

A deeply polarizing figure, Ms. Bhutto spent 30 years navigating the
turbulent and often violent world of Pakistani politics, becoming in
1988 the first woman to lead a modern Muslim country.

She had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt upon her return to
Pakistan two months ago. Her death now presents President Pervez
Musharraf with one of the most potent crises of his turbulent eight
years in power, and Bush administration officials with a new
challenge in their efforts to stabilize a front-line state — home to
both Al Qaeda and nuclear arms — in their fight against terrorism.

The attack bore hallmarks of the Qaeda-linked militants in Pakistan.
But witnesses described a sniper firing from a nearby building,
raising questions about how well the government had protected her in
a usually well-guarded garrison town and fueling speculation that
government sympathizers had played a part.

On Thursday evening, officials from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin
to local law enforcement agencies informing them about posts on some
Islamic Web sites saying that Al Qaeda was claiming responsibility
for the attack, and that the plot was orchestrated by Ayman al-
Zawahri, the group's second-ranking official.

One counterterrorism official in Washington said that the bulletin
neither confirmed nor discredited these claims. The official said
that American intelligence agencies had yet to come to any firm
judgments about who was responsible for Ms. Bhutto's death.

As world leaders lined up to express outrage at the killing of
arguably Pakistan's most pro-Western political figure, a grim-faced
President Bush said that the best way to honor her would be "by
continuing with the democratic process for which she so bravely gave
her life."

Speaking to reporters while vacationing at his ranch in Crawford,
Tex., Mr. Bush blamed Ms. Bhutto's death on "murderous extremists who
are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy." He telephoned Mr.
Musharraf on Thursday afternoon.

Mr. Musharraf went on national television on Thursday evening,
describing the killing as "a great national tragedy" and announcing a
three-day national mourning. He called it a terrorist attack and
vowed to continue to fight to root out the terrorists. "I appeal to
the nation to remain peaceful and show restraint," he said.

Despite the president's appeal, politicians and government officials
said they feared more violence in the coming days from those
protesting her death, but also from militants who would try to take
advantage of the uncertain situation.

One former government minister said the backlash against Mr.
Musharraf could make his position untenable. "Musharraf will not be
able to control the situation now," he said.

Before her return in October, Ms. Bhutto had spent nearly eight years
in self-imposed exile to avoid corruption charges stemming from her
time as prime minister in the 1990s. Her return had been promoted by
Washington as part of an agreement to share power with Mr. Musharraf
and rescue his increasingly unpopular government by giving it a more
democratic face.

She was a leading contender for prime minister in the Jan. 8
elections, campaigning as an advocate for Pakistan's return to party
politics after eight years of military rule under Mr. Musharraf, who
relinquished his military post only this month. She also presented
herself as the candidate who could best combat growing militancy in
Pakistan.

Her comments condemning militancy and suicide bombing had made her a
target of Qaeda-linked militants in Pakistan. Her homecoming
procession in Karachi was attacked by two bomb blasts that killed 150
supporters and narrowly missed killing her.

Much of the rage over her death is nonetheless likely to be directed
at Mr. Musharraf, who kept her out of power for over eight years and
had shown her only a grudging welcome at first, and later outright
hostility.

The country's other main opposition leader, another former prime
minister, Nawaz Sharif, announced Thursday evening that he was
pulling his party out of the elections. A longtime political rival of
Ms. Bhutto's, he had lately become an ally in pressing for a return
to democracy in Pakistan.

"This is a tragedy for her party, and a tragedy for our party and the
entire nation," Mr. Sharif said as he visited the hospital on hearing
the news of her death.

Tauqir Zia, a retired general who recently joined Ms. Bhutto's party,
the Pakistan People's Party, said it seemed that elections were
unlikely to go ahead now in any case. "P.P.P. is now in turmoil for
the time being," he said. "It has to find a new leadership."

Other officials and politicians said they, too, thought elections
would have to be postponed. "This is going to lead to chaos and
turmoil," said the former interior minister, Aftab Ahmed Khan
Sherpao, who was nearly killed five days ago in a suicide bombing at
a mosque in his home village. "I was anticipating this, that suicide
bombings would increase and there will be an exacerbation and
intensification in the attacks. This was bound to happen."

There were differing accounts of the attack. Zamrud Khan, a member of
her party, said Ms. Bhutto was shot in the head from gunfire that
originated from behind her car in a building nearby. Seconds later a
suicide bomber detonated his bomb, damaging one of the cars in her
motorcade and killing some 15 people on the ground, Mr. Khan said.

The Interior Ministry spokesman quoted by the state news agency, The
Associated Press of Pakistan, said that the suicide bomber first
fired on Ms. Bhutto and then blew himself up.

Amid the confusion after the explosion, the site was littered with
pools of blood. Shoes and caps of party workers were lying on the
asphalt. More than a dozen ambulances pushed through crowds of dazed
and wounded people at the scene of the assassination.

Witnesses described hearing firing barely a minute before the loud
explosion. Sajid Hussain, who had a shrapnel wound on his left hand,
said he heard at least three shots fired. "Then there was a big
explosion, the earth seemed to tremble, I fell down. And everything
was covered in black smoke."

Mr. Zia, the retired general, said he was sitting in a car ahead of
Ms. Bhutto before the blast. "A leader has to come out and lead and
she did exactly that," he said. "But I would ask where was the
security? How did they allow people to come so close to her? It is
inconceivable. There is a definite lapse of security."

Dr. Abbas Hayat of Rawalpindi General Hospital said that doctors
tried for 35 minutes to resuscitate Ms. Bhutto, who he said had
wounds to her head as well as shrapnel injuries.

Dr. Mohamed Mussadik, head of the medical college in Rawalpindi and a
top surgeon who attended to Ms. Bhutto at the hospital, said she was
clinically dead on arrival, according to Athar Minallah, a lawyer who
served in the Musharraf government but who has since helped lead the
movement against him. In a telephone interview, Mr. Minallah said Dr.
Mussadik had told him that the bullet wound was in the head.

Mr. Minallah said an independent, credible investigation into the
assassination was critical, perhaps in partnership with an outside
country. A precedent for this, he said, was the investigation into
the murder of Ms. Bhutto's brother 11 years ago. "The government has
to allow it," he said, "because the entire blame is on the
government. Everyone I have spoken to believes it is the government
that has done this. That makes the investigation of utmost
importance."

Much of the rage over her death is nonetheless likely to be directed
at Mr. Musharraf, who kept her out of power for over eight years and
had shown her only a grudging welcome at first, and later outright
hostility.

The country's other main opposition leader, another former prime
minister, Nawaz Sharif, announced Thursday evening that he was
pulling his party out of the elections. A longtime political rival of
Ms. Bhutto's, he had lately become an ally in pressing for a return
to democracy in Pakistan.

"This is a tragedy for her party, and a tragedy for our party and the
entire nation," Mr. Sharif said as he visited the hospital on hearing
the news of her death.

Tauqir Zia, a retired general who recently joined Ms. Bhutto's party,
the Pakistan People's Party, said it seemed that elections were
unlikely to go ahead now in any case. "P.P.P. is now in turmoil for
the time being," he said. "It has to find a new leadership."

Other officials and politicians said they, too, thought elections
would have to be postponed. "This is going to lead to chaos and
turmoil," said the former interior minister, Aftab Ahmed Khan
Sherpao, who was nearly killed five days ago in a suicide bombing at
a mosque in his home village. "I was anticipating this, that suicide
bombings would increase and there will be an exacerbation and
intensification in the attacks. This was bound to happen."

There were differing accounts of the attack. Zamrud Khan, a member of
her party, said Ms. Bhutto was shot in the head from gunfire that
originated from behind her car in a building nearby. Seconds later a
suicide bomber detonated his bomb, damaging one of the cars in her
motorcade and killing some 15 people on the ground, Mr. Khan said.

The Interior Ministry spokesman quoted by the state news agency, The
Associated Press of Pakistan, said that the suicide bomber first
fired on Ms. Bhutto and then blew himself up.

Amid the confusion after the explosion, the site was littered with
pools of blood. Shoes and caps of party workers were lying on the
asphalt. More than a dozen ambulances pushed through crowds of dazed
and wounded people at the scene of the assassination.

Witnesses described hearing firing barely a minute before the loud
explosion. Sajid Hussain, who had a shrapnel wound on his left hand,
said he heard at least three shots fired. "Then there was a big
explosion, the earth seemed to tremble, I fell down. And everything
was covered in black smoke."

Mr. Zia, the retired general, said he was sitting in a car ahead of
Ms. Bhutto before the blast. "A leader has to come out and lead and
she did exactly that," he said. "But I would ask where was the
security? How did they allow people to come so close to her? It is
inconceivable. There is a definite lapse of security."

Dr. Abbas Hayat of Rawalpindi General Hospital said that doctors
tried for 35 minutes to resuscitate Ms. Bhutto, who he said had
wounds to her head as well as shrapnel injuries.

Dr. Mohamed Mussadik, head of the medical college in Rawalpindi and a
top surgeon who attended to Ms. Bhutto at the hospital, said she was
clinically dead on arrival, according to Athar Minallah, a lawyer who
served in the Musharraf government but who has since helped lead the
movement against him. In a telephone interview, Mr. Minallah said Dr.
Mussadik had told him that the bullet wound was in the head.

Mr. Minallah said an independent, credible investigation into the
assassination was critical, perhaps in partnership with an outside
country. A precedent for this, he said, was the investigation into
the murder of Ms. Bhutto's brother 11 years ago. "The government has
to allow it," he said, "because the entire blame is on the
government. Everyone I have spoken to believes it is the government
that has done this. That makes the investigation of utmost
importance."

Apparently no autopsy was done, because the police did not request
one, Dawn TV reported. Lawyers calling for an international neutral
investigation are raising questions about the speed with which Ms.
Bhutto's body was moved. The body arrived in her southern home
province of Sindh before dawn, party officials told Agence-France
Presse.

The assassination is likely to deepen suspicion among Ms. Bhutto's
supporters of Pakistan's security agencies. Ms. Bhutto has long
accused parts of the government, namely the country's premier
military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or
ISI, of working against her and her party because they oppose her
liberal, secular agenda.

In a letter she sent to Mr. Musharraf just before her return to
Pakistan in October, she listed "three individuals and more" in the
letter who should be investigated for their sympathies with the
militants in case she was assassinated.

An aide close to Ms. Bhutto said that one of those named in the
letter was Ijaz Shah, the director general of the Intelligence
Bureau, another of the country's intelligence agencies and a close
associate of General Musharraf's.

The second official was the head of the country's National
Accountability Bureau, which had investigated Ms. Bhutto on
corruption charges. The third was a former official in Punjab
Province who had mistreated her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, when he
was in jail awaiting trial on corruption charges.

In an interview after Ms. Bhutto released the letter, a close aide to
Mr. Musharraf said the people named in the letter were all political
enemies of Ms. Bhutto. He said they did not have sympathy with
militants and the government was doing all it could to protect Ms.
Bhutto.

A former senior Pakistani intelligence official said he did not
believe that the country's intelligence agency was involved. He
blamed militants for the assassination, but said government-provided
protection was far too lax and the area surrounding the rally should
have been better secured.

"For sure, the government was complicit in the security aspects,"
said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "I think the
security arrangements of the police, they were not professionally
handled."


=====================


Pakistan's Bhutto Assassinated
Ruth David
http://www.forbes.com/markets/2007/12/27/pakistan-bhutto-death-
markets-emerge-cx_rd_1227markets10.html


MUMBAI - Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was shot dead
Thursday at a political rally by an attacker who then set off a blast
that left 20 others dead.

In a year of increasing violence in Pakistan, Bhutto returned home
from exile in October to contest parliamentary elections. Analysts
said the viability and legitimacy of the Jan. 8 elections have dimmed
with her death.

Bhutto, 54, survived explosions at her homecoming rally in Karachi
that claimed the lives of around 140 people, and there were several
reports that she was on militants' hit lists.

She appeared to be courting danger by insisting on holding public
rallies, and on Thursday in Rawalpindi, her supporters' worst fears
were realized.

Bhutto, who had just finished addressing a rally, was shot in the
head and neck before a suicide bomber blew himself up near her
vehicle, according to reports from the scene.

Bhutto, who was twice elected prime minister of Pakistan, was
considered a leading contender to take office a third time in
elections that President Pervez Musharraf had promised to hold in
January.

Blame for the assassination was quickly cast on Musharraf's
government.

"Everyone is saying that this army has killed Benazir. There is going
to be more bloodshed," Asma Jehangir, chairperson of the Pakistan
Human Rights Commission, told news media. Spokespersons for Bhutto's
Pakistan People's Party accused the army of not providing adequate
security for her.

Earlier this year, Musharraf and Bhutto engaged in extended power-
sharing talks that ultimately fell through when she returned to the
country and decided to publicly throw in her lot with opposition
leaders following Musharraf's decision to declare emergency rule and
dissolve the judiciary.

Her death raised doubts on whether the elections will be held.

"The biggest hope for Pakistan was for free and fair elections to
give the government some genuine legitimacy," said Gareth Price, head
of the Asia department at the London-based think tank Chatham
House. "This assassination will make it much harder to get that free
and fair election."

An alliance between Musharraf and Bhutto was seen as appealing to the
U.S., which has pumped billions of dollars in aid into Pakistan since
Musharraf came to power.

That made her a leading target of extremists, said Jennifer Harbison,
head of the Asia desk at the Control Risks Group in London.

"She was the most secular of the political leaders. She had allied
herself very clearly with the West, she spent time outside Pakistan
building contacts and connections and she has been pretty clearly
favored by the U.S. as a successor to Musharraf. For all those
reasons she came at the top of the list in terms of offending the
extremists."


Musharraf's rule has appeared increasingly shaky in recent months,
with his popularity slipping over disputes with the judiciary and his
reluctance to hold polls and shed his uniform. Musharraf has also
been the target of repeated assassination attempts by Muslim
extremists.

Bhutto's assassination could fuel further violence and instability.

Her supporters turned violent when she was taken to a hospital in
Rawalpindi, chanting slogans like "Killer Musharraf" and smashing
vehicles in the area. Musharraf lives in Rawalpindi, a satellite city
of the capital Islamabad that hosts the army headquarters.

If the elections proceed, whether Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party
will be able to capture a sympathy vote is debatable. "The party has
in the past been much overshadowed by Benazir," said Price. "Now that
she has gone, the question remains if anyone in the second tier of
the party can step up to take her place."

Furthermore, Bhutto's popularity appeared to have been not as high as
she anticipated before she returned to Pakistan, said Harbison. "It's
unclear whether her 'martyrdom,' as her party is now portraying it,
will strike a chord in popular consciousness," she said.

Bhutto's assassination drew strong responses from across the world.
In India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said: "Mrs. Bhutto was no
ordinary political leader, but one who left a deep imprint on her
time and age. Her contributions to a previous moment of hope in India
Pakistan relations, and her intent to break India Pakistan relations
out of the sterile patterns of the past, were exemplary. In her
death, the subcontinent has lost an outstanding leader who


====================


Benazir Bhutto, 54, Lived in Eye of Pakistan Storm
JANE PERLEZ and VICTORIA BURNETT
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/world/asia/28bhuttocnd.html?ref=asia


Charismatic, striking and a canny political operator, Benazir Bhutto,
54, was reared amid the privileges of Pakistan's aristocracy and the
ordeals of its turbulent politics. Smart, ambitious and resilient,
she endured her father's execution and her own imprisonment at the
hands of a military dictator to become the country's — and the Muslim
world's — first female leader.

A deeply polarizing figure, Ms. Bhutto, the "daughter of Pakistan,"
was twice elected prime minister and twice expelled from office in a
swirl of corruption charges that propelled her into self-imposed
exile in London for much of the past decade. She returned home this
fall, billing herself as a bulwark against Islamic extremism and a
tribune of democracy.

She was killed on Thursday in a combined shooting and bombing attack
at a rally in Rawalpindi, one of a series of open events she attended
in spite of a failed assassination attempt against her the day she
returned to Pakistan in October.

A woman of grand aspirations with a taste for complex political
maneuvering, Ms. Bhutto was first elected prime minister in 1988 at
the age of 35. The daughter of one of Pakistan's most charismatic and
democratically inclined prime ministers, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, she
inherited the mantle of the populist Peoples Party that he founded,
and which she came to personify.

Despite numerous accusations of corruption and an evident
predilection for luxury, Ms. Bhutto, the pale-skinned scion of a
wealthy landowning family, successfully cast herself as a savior of
Pakistan's millions of poor and disenfranchised. She inspired
devotion among her followers, even in exile, and the image of her
floating through a frenzied crowd in her gauzy white head scarf
became iconic.

In October, she staged a high-profile return to her home city of
Karachi, drawing hundreds of thousands of supporters to an 11-hour
rally and leading a series of political demonstrations in opposition
to the country's military leader, President Pervez Musharraf.

But in a foreshadowing of the attack that killed her, the triumphal
return parade was bombed, killing at least 134 of her supporters and
wounding more than 400. Ms. Bhutto herself narrowly escaped harm and
shouted at later rallies, "Bhutto is alive!"

Despite her courageous, or rash, defiance of danger, her political
plans were sidetracked from the moment she set foot in Pakistan: She
had been negotiating for months with Mr. Musharraf over a power-
sharing arrangement, only to see the general declare emergency rule
instead.

The political dance she has deftly performed since her return — one
moment standing up to President Musharraf, the next seeming to
accommodate him — stirred hope and distrust among Pakistanis. A
graduate of Harvard and Oxford, she brought the backing of the
governments in Washington and London, where she impressed with her
political lineage and considerable charm and was viewed as a
palatable alternative to the increasingly unpopular Mr. Musharraf.

But her record in power left ample room for skepticism. During her
two stints in that job — first from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993
to 1996 — she developed a reputation for acting imperiously and
impulsively. She faced deep questions about her personal probity in
office, which led to corruption cases against her in Switzerland,
Spain and Britain, as well as in Pakistan. Her husband, Asif Ali
Zardari, was jailed for eight years in Pakistan on corruption charges
before his release on bail in 2004.

During her years in office, as during those of her rival, the former
prime minister Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan ran up enormous and
unserviceable foreign debts and billions of dollars in foreign aid
went unaccounted for. Ms. Bhutto, though progressive in her approach
to Islam, was not above bending to the will of religious
conservatives for when politically expedient.

Ms. Bhutto grew up in the most rarefied atmosphere the poor,
turbulent country had to offer. One longtime friend and adviser,
Peter W. Galbraith, a former American ambassador to Croatia, recalled
meeting Ms. Bhutto 1962 when they were children: he the son of John
Kenneth Galbraith, the economist and American ambassador to India;
she the daughter of the future Pakistani prime minister. Mr.
Galbraith's father was accompanying Jacqueline Kennedy to a horse
show in Lahore.

The two met again at Harvard, where Mr. Galbraith remembered Ms.
Bhutto arriving as a prim, cake-baking 16-year-old fresh from a
Karachi convent.

Ms. Bhutto often spoke of how her father encouraged her to study the
lives of legendary female leaders, including Indira Gandhi and Joan
of Arc, and as a young woman, she observed his political maneuvering
up close.

After her father's death — he was hanged by another general who
seized power, Zia ul-Haq — Ms. Bhutto stepped into the spotlight as
his successor. She called herself chairperson for life of the
opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, a seemingly odd title in an
organization based on democratic ideals and one she has acknowledged
quarreling over with her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, in the early 1990s.

Until her death, Ms. Bhutto ruled the party with an iron hand,
jealously guarding her position, even while leading the party in
absentia for nearly a decade.

Members of her party saluted her return to Pakistan, saying she was
the best choice against President Musharraf. Chief among her
attributes, they said, was her sheer determination.

But her egotism and her proclivity for back-room deals provoked
distrust among detractors and some supporters.

"She believes she is the chosen one, that she is the daughter of
Bhutto and everything else is secondary," said Feisal Naqvi, a
corporate lawyer in Lahore who knew Ms. Bhutto.

Ms. Bhutto's marriage to Mr. Zardari was arranged by her mother, a
fact that Ms. Bhutto has often said was easily explained, even for a
modern, highly educated Pakistani woman. To be acceptable to the
Pakistani public as a politician she could not be a single woman, and
what was the difference, she would ask, between such a marriage and
computer dating?

Mr. Zardari, 51, is known for his love of polo and other perquisites
of the good life like fine clothes, expensive restaurants, homes in
Dubai and London, and an apartment in New York. He was minister of
investment in Ms. Bhutto's second government. And it was from that
perch that he made many of the deals that haunted Ms. Bhutto, and
him, in the courts.

There were accusations that the couple had illegally taken $1.5
billion from the state. It is a figure Ms. Bhutto vigorously
contested.

Indeed, one of Ms. Bhutto's main objectives in seeking to return to
power was to restore the reputation of her husband, especially after
his prison term, said Abdullah Riar, a former senator in the
Pakistani Parliament and a former colleague of Ms. Bhutto's.

"She told me, `Time will prove he is the Nelson Mandela of
Pakistan,'" Mr. Riar said.


===============


Who was Benazir Bhutto?
Facts on the life and politics of Pakistan's ex-prime minister
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22407417/


Benazir Bhutto was many things — zealous guardian of her dead
father's legacy, aristocratic populist, accused rogue, even one of
People magazine's 50 most beautiful people. And in the end, she was a
victim of roiling passions in the nation she sought to lead for a
third time.

To the West, she was the appealing and glamorous face of Pakistan — a
trailblazing feminist, the first woman to lead a Muslim nation in
modern times — though her aura was dimmed by accusations of
corruption.

But to many Pakistanis, she was a leader who spoke for them, their
needs and their hopes.

Even her worst critics would say that "she was a masterful
politician," said Zaffar Abbas, an editor for the respected Dawn
newspaper. She knew "what the people of this country wanted."

"If you asked an ordinary person what they achieved when Benazir
Bhutto was in power, they would say at least she gave us a voice and
she talked about us and our problems," Abbas said. "That was her real
achievement."

Her life was a sprawling epic
Her father, Pakistan's president and then prime minister, was hanged;
one brother died mysteriously, the other in a shootout. She spent
five years imprisoned by her father's tormentors, mostly in solitary
confinement, before rising twice to the office of prime minister.

She fled before her conviction on corruption charges, living abroad
for eight years. She could have lived there comfortably, far from the
cauldron of Pakistani politics, but chose not to do so. And when she
returned in October to marshal opposition to President Pervez
Musharraf, a suicide attacker targeted her homecoming parade in
Karachi. More than 140 people died.

The 54-year-old Bhutto escaped injury. "We will not be deterred," she
said then. And on the hustings, she celebrated her survival.

"Bhutto is alive! Bhutto is alive! Bhutto is alive!" she shouted at a
rally in December.

Like the Nehru-Gandhi family, long a force in the politics of
neighboring India, the Bhuttos have held a central role in Pakistan
for nearly a half century.

Benazir's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was the son of a wealthy
landowning family in southern Pakistan and founder of the Pakistan
People's Party. With a populist, pro-democracy message, he rose to
power in 1971.

But six years later, he was deposed by the military. In 1979 he was
executed by the government of Gen. Mohammad Zia-ul Haq after his much-
disputed conviction on charges of arranging the murder of the father
of a political opponent.

A day before he was hanged, his daughter visited him in prison.

"I told him on my oath in his death cell, I would carry on his work,"
Bhutto would recall.

But at the time and for years after, Benazir Bhutto could not fight
for her father's cause — she was in jail or under house arrest.

A Harvard-educated woman
The elder Bhutto had sent his daughter to study politics and
government at Harvard and then at Oxford, where she was elected to
lead the prestigious debating society, the Oxford Union. Beautiful,
charismatic and articulate, she was a dangerous opponent for the
military government.

Her youngest brother, Shahnawaz, organized opposition from France,
but he died under mysterious circumstances in his apartment on the
Riviera in 1980; the family insisted he was poisoned, but no charges
were brought. Released in 1984 to seek medical treatment for a
serious ear infection in London, Benazir established a People's Party
office there, and waited for an opportunity to strike back.

Two years later, she returned to lead mass rallies calling for Zia to
step down and allow a civilian government and elections. He refused.
But in 1988, the strongman died in an explosion on his plane.

She rallied her father's party, only to find that she was being
opposed by her brother, Murtaza — and that her mother was backing
him. "In our family it was always a joke that my mother had a soft
spot for my brother," she told The New York Times in 1994.

Still, Benazir Bhutto won on a platform of "food, clothing and
shelter for all." And just months after giving birth to her first
child, she took the office that was taken from her father.

Charges tarnish leader
Twenty months later, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dissolved parliament
and removed her from office, citing abuse of power. The new army-
backed government filed charges of corruption against her, while
Islamic clerics tried to get a court to bar her from running in
elections. She was a bad Muslim, they said.

"Anyone who supports the Pakistan People's Party will not enter
heaven," a Muslim cleric in Lahore, Abdul Qadir, told a Friday prayer
congregation ahead of the October 1990 elections.

She lost the election to Nawaz Sharif (who, years later, also would
be exiled and return to challenge the Musharraf government). His time
in office was also short-lived because of more accusations of
corruption. Under pressure, he resigned in 1993; Bhutto, by then a
mother of three children, won another second term as prime minister
in October 1993.

In 1996, her government fell in the face of accusations of nepotism
and economic mismanagement.

Marriage and money troubles
Around the world, Bhutto was a feminist heroine. And in her
campaigns, she advocated new services for women and opposed sexual
discrimination, though few measures were adopted under her
government.

In her personal life, Bhutto surprised many by agreeing to an
arranged marriage in 1987 with Karachi businessman Asif Ali Zardari.
She said that as the leader of a Muslim party, she was not free to
marry for love, which would have "destroyed my political career," she
told The New York Times in 1994.

But her marriage to Zardari would play a major role in her downfall.

Over the years, the couple would be accused of charging millions of
dollars in "commissions" from foreign companies. Zardari was
called "Mr. 10 Percent" during Bhutto's first term because of these
alleged kickbacks; in her second term, the take and the moniker were
upgraded to "Mr. 40 Percent."

Zardari spent eight years in Pakistani prisons before his release in
2004, though he was never convicted on any charge, and both he and
Bhutto said the accusations were trumped up and political.

"I never influenced the awarding of a contract, and until my dying
day I'll stand by it. They have tried to ruin me because they want to
ruin the concept of a pluralistic, liberal Pakistan. To be accused of
robbing, that really pains me," she said in 1999.

Switzerland froze more than $13 million in the couple's accounts and
convicted Bhutto of money laundering. The conviction was thrown out
when she contested it.

Zardari also, briefly, was accused of engineering the 1996 death of
Murtaza Bhutto, who died in a gunbattle with police in Karachi. His
death contributed to the fall of Benazir's government a month later.

Bhutto tried for a third term and lost; she left Pakistan in 1999,
just before a court convicted her of corruption and banned her from
politics.

The verdict was later quashed, but she stayed away. She spent much of
the time in London and in Dubai with her children and her ailing
mother — the same mother who once opposed her political career.

An elated Bhutto returns home
Then Musharraf signed an amnesty, halting any corruption charges
against her and others. And she decided to return to Pakistan and the
political arena once more. She was briefly placed under house arrest
when Musharraf declared a state of emergency this fall.

As she had done before, she campaigned on social welfare issues,
occasionally mentioning the anti-terrorist message that had made her
so appealing to American officials. Last week, after she addressed a
rally in her husband's hometown of Nawab Shah, she was in a relaxed
and upbeat mood.

"It feels great to be back home," she said. "A visit to every city is
like a new experience for me. I'm just overwhelmed with emotion. I
feel like I have been given a new life to be once more amongst my
people."

She was a survivor, and proud of it. Thirteen years before, when a
reporter from the Times suggested that her life was the stuff of
Greek drama, she laughed.

"Well, I hope not so tragic," she said. "Don't all Greek dramas end
in tragedy?"




================


Bhutto's body flown home
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/12/27/pakistan.friday/index.html
?iref=werecommend


RAWALPINDI, Pakistan (CNN) -- Pakistan's streets were eerily quiet
and empty early Friday after a night of anger and anguish following
the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Bhutto's body arrived in the hours before dawn at her ancestral
village of Garhi-Khuda Baksh for burial after a long journey from
Rawalpindi, where she died, by transport plane, helicopter and
ambulance.

The former prime minister's family -- her husband and three children -
- accompanied the body aboard a Pakistani Air Force C-130 transport
plane to Sukkor but traveled by bus from there to Larkana and on to
Garhi-Khuda Baksh.

The funeral is planned for Friday afternoon. In Washington, White
House spokesman Scott Stanzel said Bhutto's family had requested a
private funeral.

Bhutto, 54, was killed Thursday by the bullets of an assassin who
blew himself up after firing the shots, killing at least 28 more
people and wounding at least 100, GEO-TV reported.

Bhutto, who was campaigning for next month's parliamentary elections,
had completed an election rally minutes earlier and was leaving the
rally site, Rawalpindi's Liaquat Bagh Park, at the time of the attack.

As a shocked Pakistan absorbed the news of Bhutto's death,
authorities called for calm and asked residents to stay inside.

Many obliged, shuttering shops or rushing home from work and
surrendering the streets to protesters who set fire to banks, shops
and gas stations, blocked streets and pelted police with rocks,
Pakistani media reported.

At least five people were killed in Karachi in the violence, GEO TV
reported, and dozens more were wounded. Police in Khairpur fired on
an angry mob, killing two people, the station reported, and two more
people were killed in Larkana.

It's all mayhem everywhere," Shehryar Ahmad, an investment banker in
Karachi, told CNN by telephone. "There's absolutely no order of any
kind. No army on the streets. No curfew."

Ahmad said that he saw dozens of burned-out cars as he drove home
from work. A one-mile strip leading to Bhutto's Karachi house was
a "ghost town," he said.

Bhutto's body was being transported to the family's ancestral
graveyard in Gari-Khuda Baksh in Sindh province, where she will be
buried later Friday, said Sen. Safdar Abbasi, a leader of her
Pakistan People's Party. Watch how the tragedy unfolded »

The first leg was completed when, according to Pakistani TV stations,
a Pakistan Air Force plane landed at Sukkur at about 3:15 a.m. Friday
(5:30 p.m. Thursday ET). Bhutto's body was accompanied by her husband
and three children.

Bhutto is expected to be taken the rest of the way to her ancestral
home by helicopter. Authorities are avoiding road travel because it
could be mobbed by grieving supporters, the television stations
reported.

Her coffin body was removed from Rawalpindi General Hospital late
Thursday -- carried above a crowd of grieving supporters

Bhutto spent her final moments giving a stirring address to thousands
of supporters at a political rally in a park in Rawalpindi, a city of
roughly 1.5 million that is 14 km (9 miles) south of the Pakistani
capital, Islamabad.

She climbed into a white Land Rover and stood through the sunroof to
wave to crowds after the speech.

It was then that someone fired two shots, and Bhutto slumped back
into the vehicle, said John Moore, a news photographer with Getty
Images who saw what happened.

Seconds later an explosion rocked the park, sending orange flames
into the throng of Bhutto supporters and littering the park with
twisted metal and chunks of rubble. The carnage was everywhere, he
said.

The assassination happened in Liaquat Bagh Park, named for Pakistan's
first prime minister -- Liaquat Ali Khan -- who was assassinated in
the same location in 1951.

The attack came just hours after four supporters of former Pakistan
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif died when members of another political
party opened fire on them at a rally near the Islamabad airport
Thursday, Pakistan police said.

Several other members of Sharif's party were wounded, police said.

Bhutto, who led Pakistan from 1988-1990 and 1993-96, but both times
the sitting president dismissed her amid corruption allegations. She
was the first female prime minister of any Islamic nation, and was
participating in the parliamentary election set for January 8, hoping
for a third term as prime minister. Watch Benazir Bhutto obituary »

A terror attack targeting her motorcade in Karachi killed 136 people
on the day she returned to Pakistan after eight years of self-imposed
exile.

Bhutto had been critical of what she believed was a lack of effort by
President Pervez Musharraf's government to protect her.

Two weeks after the October assassination attempt, she wrote a
commentary for CNN.com in which she questioned why Pakistan
investigators refused international offers of help in finding the
attackers.


================


Benazir Bhutto: Hope Denied
David A. Andelman,
David A. Andelman is executive editor of Forbes.com and the author of
A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.
http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2007/12/27/benazir-bhutto-impact-oped-
cx_daa_1227bhutto.html


Any chance of a peaceful transition to a semblance of democratic rule
in Pakistan died Thursday with Benazir Bhutto.

Bhutto possessed enormous reserves of good will that crossed a host
of factional lines that divide this troubled nation. No other
individual was at once so potentially uniting and divisive in the
world's sixth-most-populous country.

This is not to say Bhutto was a stranger to controversy nor
accusations of corruption, self-dealing and hubris--many of the same
charges that dogged her father, and ultimately led to his death at
the hands of Pakistan's previous military dictator, Gen. Zia ul-Haq.

I speak with some first-hand experience, having known Bhutto, first
at Harvard, later in Pakistan. I also knew the man who ordered the
execution of her father, Prime Minister Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Three years later, Gen. Zia himself met a fiery death in a mid-air
explosion of a military aircraft. The circumstances of that incident
have never been satisfactorily explained.

Pakistan, nominally a democracy, has developed a political system
that seems destined to spawn violence and serve as a breeding ground
for extremists of all types. Peaceful transitions have, throughout
much of its history, proved to be but illusory interludes between
coups and violent electoral campaigns.

Pakistan itself was born in the violence that brought an end to
centuries of British rule over the entire sub-continent. The Raj was
a stewardship designed to profit England and serve as a cornerstone
to an empire on which the sun never set. But by the end of World War
I, and the deeply flawed peace document known as the Treaty of
Versailles, this stewardship was beginning to fray. It eventually
came to an end after the Second World War amid protests and demands
for independence that swept the entire region.

By the time the British had departed, two nations--Hindu India and
Moslem Pakistan--were created, the latter destined to split apart
into the nations of Pakistan and Bangladesh. While India has managed
in the course of the last half-century to adopt a free and democratic
government and, more recently, a vibrant economy that is among the
world's fastest growing, Pakistan has sunk into a morass of feuding
political factions and violent extremists.

By July 6, 1977, when I first arrived in Pakistan, the nation had
managed to struggle through a host of unstable governments, rent by
warring factions and led until that moment by Benazir Bhutto's
father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. On the morning before my
arrival, a group of military officers, fed up with the corruption
they alleged had overtaken the nation, seized power in a swift,
dramatic and initially bloodless coup. Gen. Zia ul-Haq, leader of the
junta, proclaimed himself martial law administrator, then a year
later, assumed the title of president.

Two days later, I sat in a large conference room of the Rawalpindi
Intercontinental, just behind the military camp where Zia and his
fellow officers were based, and met the general for the first time.
The 52-year-old man who took the podium, with a small swagger stick
under his left arm, had a ramrod-straight bearing and was every inch
the British military officer that had marked the early years of his
career. (He was also trained at the U.S. Army's Command and General
Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.)

Gen. Zia bore a striking resemblance to the British comedian Terry
Thomas, but there was nothing amusing about this officer. He was all
business as he described the nature of the rule he planned to bring
to his impoverished nation.

It would be, he said, a rule of law, but a rule of Shariya, or
Islamic law. He described--with way too much relish and in clinical
detail--how the right hand of a convicted thief would be amputated by
a surgeon, peeling back the skin of the wrist, then separating the
bones at the joint. Conviction for a higher crime of robbery would
cost the unfortunate individual both his right hand and his left foot
(at the ankle).

Without question, there had been chaos in Pakistan in the months
leading up to Gen. Zia's seizure of power. A close lieutenant of
Bhutto had been murdered by a bomb blast in the town of Peshawar in
the Northwest Frontier Province that is today considered a likely
refuge of a number of Al Qaeda leaders, possibly Osama bin Laden
himself. And there were battles between a broad spectrum of other
political leaders as well.

In short, the circumstances were not considerably different from
those that preceded Friday's assassination of Bhutto's daughter,
Benazir.

Somehow, the trajectories of power in Pakistan all seem to follow
nearly unbroken and parallel lines. When Gen. Zia met with
international journalists in Rawalpindi back in 1977, he pledged (as
he did to his own nation) to hold national and provincial assembly
elections within 90 days and to hand over power to those elected in
this process. The nation's constitution, he added, had not been
repealed, simply suspended.

Sound familiar? Gen. Pervez Musharaff has made the nearly identical
pledges today, three decades later. First, martial law. Suspend the
constitution. Elections within 90 days?

But three months after Gen. Zia's seizure of power there were no
national elections--they were "postponed." Instead, Zia demanded an
accountability process for all politicians who hoped to stand for
elections--meaningless exercises, as it turned out, as Zia continued
to hold all the reins of power.

A year later, Zia proclaimed himself president of Pakistan, a post he
would hold until his death. And on April 4, 1979, Benazir Bhutto's
father was hanged for alleged complicity in the murder of the father
of an opposition politician. The Supreme Court affirmed his death
sentence in a 4-to-3 vote. Now, with Benazir Bhutto's assassination,
the niceties of law and justice have been done away with in one
catastrophic stroke.

Then, as now, the U.S. did pay lip service to a desire to return
Pakistan to democratic rule. While there were slaps on the wrist by
President Jimmy Carter, who briefly slashed military aid to the
country when Gen. Zia began to press ahead with a nuclear weapons
program, all this changed on Dec. 25, 1979, when the Soviet Union
invaded neighboring Afghanistan.

American military assistance to Gen. Zia returned and with the
arrival of Ronald Reagan in the White House January 1981, the pace of
assistance to a Pakistani military that had sworn defiance to the
Soviet turned into a tsunami of funding. Suddenly, then as now,
Pakistan was in a unique geopolitical position. The U.S. had no
choice but to support the man who was defying its enemy.

Gone were any demands for a return to democratic norms, and when I
renewed my acquaintance with Gen. Zia in the mid-1980s, he was riding
very high indeed. Pakistan was on the cusp of becoming a nuclear
power. Zia was, it would appear, president for life, though he was
making some gestures to increasing demands at home and abroad for a
return to at least a fig leaf of democracy. But not for long.

Four years later, nearly a decade after he assumed power, and fed up
with continued bickering with the National Assembly, he had suffered
to be elected, he dissolved that body and again promised democratic
elections within 90 days. Now, there was another Bhutto on the
horizon--even more popular, if that was even possible, even more of a
political threat. This was Benazir Bhutto, Zulfikar's brilliant,
popular, Harvard-educated daughter. She'd returned in 1986, and now
was pledging to stand for election herself, Zia was in a quandary.
But it was one that he would never have to resolve.

On Aug. 17, 1988, the C-130 Hercules military aircraft he was riding
with a number of his top officers and the U.S. ambassador to
Pakistan, exploded in mid-air killing all on board. Though an FBI
team dispatched to the scene declared it an accident, rumors
persisted of more nefarious causes. There was talk that the only way
to restore democratic rule to Pakistan and for America to rid itself
of an embarrassing dictator was to remove him--and that the CIA had
managed that mostly deftly.

Indeed, his death did return the nation to democratic rule. A
president and National Assembly were elected. The U.S. continued to
expand its military and civilian aid. Yet a decade later, on Oct. 12,
1999, Gen. Pervez Musharraf and his fellow officers seized power in
another bloodless coup. The cycle had begun again.

America's experience in Pakistan, and in scores of other countries
around the world, has demonstrated one critical reality. At one point
in the trajectory of any dictator, you own him. At another point, he
owns you. We've reached that point now with Gen. Musharraf.

There's a good chance that Benazir Bhutto might have been able to
break this cycle. Now, however, Gen. Musharraf has an excellent
excuse to postpone or cancel elections he was no doubt little
interested in holding in the first place.

Above all, the one person who might have found a way to bring
together key factions--from military officers to Islamic
fundamentalists--and unite them in a battle against the extremists
who promised to turn this nation into a staging ground for
international terrorists is dead. Ironically, her last important
action before her assassination was a meeting with Afghan President
Hamid Karzai. The subject? Joining forces to fight the war on terror.

"We, too, believe that it is essential for both of our countries, and
indeed the larger Muslim world, to work to protect the interest of
Islamic civilization by eliminating extremism and terrorism," Bhutto
said after their meeting.

Hour later, after she met her death at the hands of an assassin,
Karzai responded:

"I am deeply sorry, deeply pained that this brave sister of us, this
great daughter of the Muslim world is no longer with us. She
sacrificed her life for the sake of Pakistan and for the sake of the
region."


==============


Bhutto Supporters Blame Musharraf
Ruth David
http://www.forbes.com/markets/2007/12/27/pakistan-bhutto-update-
markets-emerge-cx_rd_1227markets26.html?boxes=relstories


MUMBAI - Supporters of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of
Pakistan are blaming the government of President Pervez Musharraf for
her assassination on Thursday, with violent protests breaking out
around the country.

In a year of increasing violence in Pakistan, Bhutto returned home
from exile in October to contest parliamentary elections. Analysts
said the viability and legitimacy of the Jan. 8 national and
provincial elections have dimmed with her death.

Bhutto, 54, survived explosions at her homecoming rally in Karachi
that claimed the lives of around 140 people, and there were several
reports that she was on militants' hit lists.

The leader of the country's largest political movement—the Pakistan
People's Party--appeared to be courting danger by insisting on
holding public rallies, and on Thursday in Rawalpindi, her
supporters' worst fears were realized.

Bhutto, who had just finished addressing a rally, was shot in the
head and neck before a suicide bomber blew himself up near her
vehicle, according to reports from the scene.

Her supporters turned violent when she was taken to a hospital in
Rawalpindi, chanting slogans like "Killer Musharraf" and smashing
vehicles in the area. Musharraf lives in Rawalpindi, a satellite city
of the capital Islamabad that hosts the army headquarters.

"The situation is very tense. We're hearing reports from all the
major cities and towns of protestors on the rampage, setting fire to
vehicles, shutting down shops," said Salim Bokhari, editor of The
News. "Bhutto's death will have a lasting impact on Pakistani
politics, the nation is waiting to see how Musharraf will deal with
this," Bokhari told Forbes.com.

Musharraf made a brief statement blaming religious extremists who his
government has been fighting. "Terrorism is the biggest threat to
Pakistan, I will not rest until it has been rooted out," he said, but
didn't go into details of the government's next move.

There is speculation Bhutto's husband, Asif Zardari, will return to
Pakistan and don her political mantle. During her two terms as prime
minister, Zardari was accused of stealing millions of dollars from
the state coffers and served prison time.

Bhutto, a mother of three, was charged in a handful of corruption
cases that were dropped after an amnesty in October that enabled her
to return from Dubai. Earlier this year, Musharraf and Bhutto engaged
in extended power-sharing talks that ultimately fell through when she
returned and threw in her lot with opposition leaders following
Musharraf's decision to declare emergency rule and dissolve the
judiciary.

She was considered a leading contender to take office a third time in
the January elections.

Former rival Nawaz Sharif, who also returned to Pakistan recently for
the January elections, promised to take up Bhutto's battle. "This is
very tragic…I assure you that I will fight your war from now on,"
Sharif told Bhutto's supporters outside the hospital in Rawalpindi.
But with his own life in danger, media reports said Sharif was
considering boycotting the polls.

Blame for the assassination was quickly cast on Musharraf's
government.

"Everyone is saying that this army has killed Benazir. There is going
to be more bloodshed," Asma Jehangir, chairperson of the Pakistan
Human Rights Commission, told reporters. Spokespersons for Bhutto's
Pakistan People's Party accused the army of not providing adequate
security.

Bhutto's death has also raised doubts on whether the elections will
be held.

"The biggest hope for Pakistan was for free and fair elections to
give the government some genuine legitimacy," said Gareth Price, head
of the Asia department at the London-based think tank Chatham
House. "This assassination will make it much harder to get that free
and fair election."

An alliance between Musharraf and Bhutto was seen as appealing to the
United States, which pumped billions of dollars in aid into Pakistan
since Musharraf came to power, but is now imposing several conditions
on concerns the government is going back on its anti-terrorism drive.

Harvard-educated Bhutto' appeal to the West made her a leading target
of extremists, said Jennifer Harbison, head of the Asia desk at the
Control Risks Group in London.

"She was the most secular of the political leaders. She had allied
herself very clearly with the West, she spent time outside Pakistan
building contacts and connections and she has been pretty clearly
favored by the U.S. as a successor to Musharraf. For all those
reasons she came at the top of the list in terms of offending the
extremists."

Musharraf's rule has appeared increasingly shaky in recent months,
with his popularity slipping over disputes with the judiciary and his
reluctance to hold polls and shed his uniform. Musharraf has also
been the target of repeated assassination attempts by Muslim
extremists.

"There is no such thing as foolproof security against such determined
attackers in any country," said Tariq Azim, who was deputy
information minister before the government appointed a caretaker
government to hold the elections. "Today, everyone entering the rally
area at Rawalpindi was thoroughly searched. But when Bhutto was
leaving the premises in her vehicle, she stopped to interact with
supporters, and that's when she was killed."

The minister was quick to acknowledge her popularity. "She was the
first Muslim woman in the world to become the prime minister of a
nation. That means a lot to us. One may not agree with her policies
or her posturing, but Bhutto was one of the most popular leaders in
Pakistan. We will mourn her death," Azim said.

If the elections proceed, whether Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party
will be able to capture a sympathy vote is debatable. "The party has
in the past been much overshadowed by Benazir," said Price of Chatham
House. "Now that she has gone, the question remains if anyone in the
second tier of the party can step up to take her place."

Bhutto's assassination drew strong responses from across the world.
In India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said: "Mrs. Bhutto was no
ordinary political leader, but one who left a deep imprint on her
time and age. Her contributions to a previous moment of hope in India
Pakistan relations, and her intent to break India Pakistan relations
out of the sterile patterns of the past, were exemplary. In her
death, the subcontinent has lost an outstanding leader who worked for
democracy and reconciliation in her country."

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who had met Bhutto earlier Thursday,
said: "We in Afghanistan condemn this act of cowardice and immense
brutality in the strongest possible terms. She sacrificed her life,
for the sake of Pakistan and for the sake of this region."


=======================


Officials: Al Qaeda claims responsibility for Bhutto killing
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/12/27/bhutto.dhs.alqaeda/index.htm
l?iref=mpstoryview


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security
issued a bulletin Thursday citing an alleged claim of responsibility
by al Qaeda for former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's
assassination, a DHS official told CNN.

But such a claim has not appeared on radical Islamist Web sites that
regularly post such messages from al Qaeda and other militant groups.

The source of the claim was apparently an obscure Italian news
agency, Adnkronos International (AKI), which said that al Qaeda
Afghanistan commander and spokesman Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid had
telephoned the agency to make the claim.

"We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat
[the] mujahadeen," AKI quoted Al-Yazid as saying.

According to AKI, al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri set the wheels in
motion for the assassination in October.

One Islamist Web site repeated the claim, but that Web site is not
considered a reliable source for Islamist messages by experts in the
field.

The DHS official said the claim was "an unconfirmed open source claim
of responsibility" and the bulletin was sent out at about 6 p.m. to
state and local law enforcement agencies.

The official characterized the bulletin as "information sharing."

Ross Feinstein, spokesman for Director of National Intelligence Mike
McConnell, said the U.S. intelligence community is monitoring the
situation and trying to figure out who is responsible for the
assassination.

"We are not in a position to confirm who may be responsible,"
Feinstein said.

Feinstein said that the intelligence community "obviously analyze(s)
open source intelligence," but he would not say whether the community
believes the claim has any validity.

For now, he said, there is "no conclusion" as to who may be
responsible.


Earlier, DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said Bhutto's assassination had
not prompted "any adjustments to our security posture."

"Of course, we continue to closely monitor events as they unfold
overseas," he said


=============


Bhutto assassination severe blow to U.S. efforts to stabilize Pakistan
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/27/us.pakistan.ap/index.html?
eref=rss_topstories


WASHINGTON (AP) -- The assassination of former Pakistani Prime
Minister Benazir Bhutto has dealt a severe blow to U.S. efforts to
restore stability and democracy in a turbulent, nuclear-armed Islamic
nation that has been a critical ally in the war on terror.

While not entirely dependent on Bhutto, recent Bush administration
policy on Pakistan had focused heavily on promoting reconciliation
between the secular opposition leader who has been dogged by
corruption allegations and Pakistan's increasingly unpopular
president, Pervez Musharraf, ahead of parliamentary elections set for
January.

In Washington and Islamabad, U.S. diplomats urged that January 8
elections should not be postponed and strongly advised against a
reimposition of emergency rule that Musharraf had lifted just weeks
ago.

The United States has poured billions of dollars in financial
assistance into Pakistan since September 11, 2001, when Musharraf
made a calculated decision to align his government with Washington in
going after al Qaeda and the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan. That
move is blamed for several unsuccessful assassination attempts on him.

But it was not immediately clear, however, what if any influence
Washington might have or whether Bhutto's death would drive the
United States into a deeper embrace of Musharraf, whom some believe
offers the best chance for Pakistani stability despite his democratic
shortcomings.

"This latest tragedy is likely to reinforce beliefs that Pakistan is
a dangerous, messy place and potentially very unstable and fragile
and that they need to cling to Musharraf even more than they did in
the past," said Daniel Markey, who left the State Department this
year and is now a senior fellow at the private Council on Foreign
Relations.

"The weight of the administration is still convinced that Musharraf
is a helpful rather than a harmful figure," he said.

Amid the political chaos and uncertainty roiling the country in the
wake of Bhutto's slaying, U.S. officials scrambled Thursday to
understand the implications for the massive aid and counter-terrorism
programs that have been criticized by lawmakers, especially as al
Qaeda and Taliban extremists appear resurgent along the Pakistan-
Afghan border.

Underscoring the concerns, a grim President Bush interrupted his
vacation to personally condemn Bhutto's murder, demanding that those
responsible be brought to justice and calling on Pakistanis to
continue to press for democracy.

"We urge them to honor Benazir Bhutto's memory by continuing with the
democratic process for which she so bravely gave her life," Bush told
reporters at his Texas ranch, before speaking briefly to Musharraf by
phone.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Bhutto's assassination
would "no doubt test the will and patience of the people of Pakistan"
but called on the Pakistani people in a statement "to work together
to build a more moderate, peaceful, and democratic future."

Yet such calls could fall on deaf ears, experts said.

"The United States does not have a great deal of leverage where
Pakistan is concerned," said Wendy Sherman, who served as counselor
to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. "And at the end of
the day, the decisions are going to be made by the Pakistani people
and by the leadership of Pakistan and not by the United States."

Other analysts warned that Bhutto's assassination might further
damage Musharraf, whose democratic credentials have been seriously
tarnished by growing authoritarianism, and have lead to widespread
unrest.

"Legitimacy for Musharraf will be deferred if not impossible," said
Christine Fair, a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation. "The
U.S. likely does not have a plan for this contingency as Musharraf
remains a critical ally and because Bhutto's participation was hoped
to confer legitimacy to the upcoming January elections."

She also warned that the murder could embolden militants in Pakistan
to seek out other high-profile targets.

Bhutto, who served twice as Pakistan's prime minister between 1988
and 1996, was mortally wounded Thursday in a suicide attack that also
killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally in Rawalpindi. She had
returned to Pakistan from an eight-year exile on October 18 when her
homecoming parade in Karachi was also targeted by a suicide attacker.

The attempt on her life added to U.S. concerns about the country that
had already been heightened by the situation in Pakistan, largely
ungoverned frontier provinces where a truce between Musharraf's
government and tribal leaders is credited with helping extremists
regroup and reorganize.

In addition, Musharraf's declaration of emergency this fall, along
with a clampdown on opposition figures and judges, irritated the
administration, which was criticized in Congress for lax oversight of
the nearly $10 billion in U.S. that poured into the country since he
became an indispensable counterterrorism ally after 9/11.

Under heavy U.S. pressure, Musharraf resigned as army chief and
earlier this month lifted emergency rule to prepare for the
elections. Bhutto's return and ability to run for parliament had been
a cornerstone of Bush's policy in Pakistan.

Congress last week imposed new restrictions on U.S. assistance to
Pakistan, including tying $50 million in military aid to State
Department assurances that the country is making "concerted efforts"
to prevent terrorists from operating inside its borders.

Under the law, which provides a total of $300 million in aid to
Pakistan and was signed by Bush on Wednesday, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice also must guarantee that Pakistan is implementing
democratic reforms, including releasing political prisoners and
restoring an independent judiciary. The law also prevents any of the
funds from being used for cash transfer assistance to Pakistan, but
that stipulation had already been adopted by the administration.


===============


Benazir Bhutto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benazir_Bhutto


Benazir Bhutto (IPA: [beːnɜziːr
bʰʊʈʈoː]; June 21, 1953 – December
27, 2007) was a Pakistani politician who chaired the Pakistan Peoples
Party (PPP) (Urdu: پاکستان
پیپلز پارٹی), a
centre-left political
party in Pakistan affiliated to the Socialist International. Bhutto
was the first woman elected to lead a Muslim state, having been twice
elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. She was sworn in for the first
time in 1988 but removed from office 20 months later under orders of
then-president Ghulam Ishaq Khan on grounds of alleged corruption. In
1993 Bhutto was re-elected but was again removed in 1996 on similar
charges, this time by President Farooq Leghari.

Bhutto went into self-imposed exile in Dubai in 1998, where she
remained until she returned to Pakistan on 18 October 2007, after
reaching an understanding with President Musharraf by which she was
granted amnesty and all corruption charges were withdrawn.[1]

She was the eldest child of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto, a Pakistani of Sindhi descent, and Begum Nusrat Bhutto, a
Pakistani of Iranian-Kurdish descent. Her paternal grandfather was
Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, who came to Larkana Sindh before partition
from his native town of Bhatto Kalan, which was situated in the
Indian state of Haryana.

She was assassinated on 27 December 2007, in a combined suicide bomb
attack and shooting during a political rally of the Pakistan Peoples
Party in the Liaquat National Bagh in Rawalpindi.[2] Ex-government
spokesman Tariq Azim Khan said that, although it appeared that she
had been shot, it was unclear whether her wounds had been caused by a
shooting or shrapnel from the bomb. Eyewitnesses to the assassination
stated to various news agencies that Ms. Bhutto had stood up through
the sunroof of the white Toyota Land Cruiser that ferried her to the
rally[2] to wave at supporters who were cheering her. It is then that
a "thin man" on a motorcycle, carrying an AK-47 rifle, fired two
shots, one into Bhutto's neck, and she fell back into the vehicle.[3]
After this, the assailant proceeded to detonate an explosive which
resulted in the deaths of himself and at least 22 others, while many
others were injured. Bhutto was rushed to Rawalpindi General Hospital
where she died at 6:16 p.m. (Pakistan local time) (1316 UTC). The
gunshot to the neck was reported as the cause of death, according to
the Pakistani Interior Ministry.[3]


Education and personal life
Benazir Bhutto was born in Karachi, Dominion of Pakistan on 21 June
1953. She attended the Lady Jennings Nursery School and then the
Convent of Jesus and Mary in Karachi.[4] After two years of schooling
at the Rawalpindi Presentation Convent, she was sent to the Jesus and
Mary Convent at Murree. She passed her O-level examination at the age
of 15.[5] She then went on to complete her A-Levels at the Karachi
Grammar School.

After completing her early education in Pakistan, she pursued her
higher education in the United States. From 1969 to 1973 she attended
Radcliffe College, and then Harvard University, where she obtained a
Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude in comparative government.[6] She
was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa.[5]

The next phase of her education took place in the United Kingdom.
Between 1973 and 1977 Bhutto studied Philosophy, Politics, and
Economics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She completed a course in
International Law and Diplomacy while at Oxford.[7] In December 1976
she was elected president of the Oxford Union, becoming the first
Asian woman to head the prestigious debating society.[5]

On 18 December 1987 she married Asif Ali Zardari in Karachi. The
couple had three children: Bilawal, Bakhtwar, and Aseefa.


Family
Benazir Bhutto's father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto,
was dismissed as Prime Minister in 1975, on charges similar to those
Benazir Bhutto would later face. Later, in a 1977 trial on charges of
conspiracy to murder the father of dissident politician Ahmed Raza
Kasuri, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was sentenced to death.

Despite the accusation being "widely doubted by the public",[8] and
despite many clemency appeals from foreign leaders, Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto was hanged on 4 April 1979. Appeals for clemency were
dismissed by acting President General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Benazir
Bhutto and her mother were held in a "police camp" until the end of
May, after the execution.[9]

In 1985, Benazir Bhutto's brother Shahnawaz was killed under
suspicious circumstances, in France. The killing of another of her
brothers, Mir Murtaza, in 1996, contributed to destabilizing her
second term as Prime Minister.


Prime Minister
Benazir Bhutto on a visit to Washington, D.C. in 1988Bhutto, who had
returned to Pakistan after completing her studies, found herself
placed under house arrest in the wake of her father's imprisonment
and subsequent execution. Having been allowed in 1984 to return to
the United Kingdom, she became a leader in exile of the Pakistan
Peoples Party (PPP), her father's party, though she was unable to
make her political presence felt in Pakistan until after the death of
General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. She had succeeded her mother as leader
of the Pakistan People's Party and the pro-democracy opposition to
the Zia-ul-Haq regime.

On 16 November 1988, in the first open election in more than a
decade, Bhutto's PPP won the largest bloc of seats in the National
Assembly. Bhutto was sworn in as Prime Minister of a coalition
government on 2 December, becoming at age 35 the youngest person —
and the first woman — to head the government of a Muslim-majority
state in modern times. That same year, People Magazine included Ms.
Bhutto in its list of The Fifty Most Beautiful People. In 1989, she
was awarded the Prize For Freedom by the Liberal International.

Bhutto's government was dismissed in 1990 following charges of
corruption, for which she never was tried. Zia's protégé Nawaz Sharif
subsequently came to power. Bhutto was re-elected in 1993 but was
dismissed three years later amid various corruption scandals by then
president Farooq Leghari, who used the Eighth Amendment discretionary
powers to dissolve the government. The Supreme Court affirmed
President Leghari's dismissal in a 6-1 ruling.[10] In 2006, Interpol
issued a request for arrest of Bhutto and her husband.[11]

The criticism against Bhutto came largely from the Punjabi elites and
powerful landlord families who opposed Bhutto as she pushed Pakistan
into nationalist reform, opposing feudals, whom she blamed for the
destabilization of Pakistan.


Musharraf's disqualification
On 17 September 2007 Benazir Bhutto accused Pervez Musharraf's allies
of pushing Pakistan into crisis by their refusal to permit democratic
reforms and power-sharing. A nine-member panel of Supreme Court
judges deliberated on six petitions (including one from Jamaat-e-
Islami, Pakistan's largest Islamic group) asserting that Musharraf be
disqualified from contending for the presidency of Pakistan. Bhutto
stated that her party could join one of the opposition groups,
potentially that of Nawaz Sharif. Attorney-general Malik Mohammed
Qayyum stated that, pendente lite, the Election Commission
was "reluctant" to announce the schedule for the presidential vote.
Bhutto's party's Farhatullah Babar stated that the Constitution could
bar Musharraf from being elected again because he was already chief
of the army: "As Gen. Musharraf was disqualified from contesting for
President, he has prevailed upon the Election Commission to
arbitrarily and illegally tamper with the Constitution of
Pakistan."[12]


Policies for women
During election campaigns the Bhutto government voiced its concern
for women's social and health issues, including the issue of
discrimination against women. Bhutto announced plans to establish
women's police stations, courts, and women's development banks.
Despite these promises, Bhutto did not propose any legislation to
improve welfare services for women. During her election campaigns,
Bhutto promised to repeal controversial laws (such as Hudood and Zina
ordinances) that curtail the rights of women in Pakistan. Her party
never did fulfil these promises during her tenures as Prime Minister,
due to immense pressure from the opposition.

Only after her stints as Prime Minister did her party initiate
legislation to repeal the Zina ordinance, during General Musharraf's
regime. These efforts were defeated by the right-wing religious
parties that dominated the legislatures at the time.


Policy on Taliban
The Taliban took power in Kabul in September 1996. It was during
Bhutto's rule that the Taliban gained prominence in Afghanistan. She
viewed the Taliban as a group that could stabilize Afghanistan and
enable trade access to the Central Asian republics, according to
author Stephen Coll.[13] He claims that her government provided
military and financial support for the Taliban, even sending a small
unit of the Pakistani army into Afghanistan.

More recently, she took an anti-Taliban stance, and condemned
terrorist acts committed by the Taliban and their supporters.


Exile
After being dismissed by the then-president of Pakistan on charges of
corruption, her party lost the October elections. She served as
leader of the opposition while Nawaz Sharif became Prime Minister for
the next three years. Elections were held again in October 1993 and
her PPP coalition was victorious, returning Bhutto to office. In 1996
her government was once again dismissed on corruption charges.


Charges of corruption
French, Polish, Spanish, and Swiss documents have fueled the charges
of corruption against Bhutto and her husband. Bhutto and her husband
faced a number of legal proceedings, including a charge of laundering
money through Swiss banks. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, spent eight
years in prison on similar corruption charges. Zardari, released from
jail in 2004, has suggested that his time in prison involved torture;
human rights groups have supported his claim that his rights were
violated.[14]

A 1998 New York Times investigative report[15] indicates that
Pakistani investigators have documents that uncover a network of bank
accounts, all linked to the family's lawyer in Switzerland, with Asif
Zardari as the principal shareholder. According to the article,
documents released by the French authorities indicated that Zardari
offered exclusive rights to Dassault, a French aircraft manufacturer,
to replace the air force's fighter jets in exchange for a 5%
commission to be paid to a Swiss corporation controlled by Zardari.
The article also said a Dubai company received an exclusive license
to import gold into Pakistan for which Asif Zardari received payments
of more than $10M into his Dubai-based Citibank accounts. The owner
of the company denied that he had made payments to Zardari and claims
the documents were forged.

Bhutto maintained that the charges leveled against her and her
husband were purely political.[16][17] "Most of those documents are
fabricated," she said, "and the stories that have been spun around
them are absolutely wrong." An Auditor General of Pakistan (AGP)
report supports Bhutto's claim. It presents information suggesting
that Benazir Bhutto was ousted from power in 1990 as a result of a
witch hunt approved by then-president Ghulam Ishaq Khan. The AGP
report says Khan illegally paid legal advisers 28 million Rupees to
file 19 corruption cases against Bhutto and her husband in 1990-92.
[18]

The assets held by Bhutto and her husband have been scrutinized. The
prosecutors have alleged that their Swiss bank accounts contain £740
million.[19] Zardari also bought a neo-Tudor mansion and estate worth
over £4 million in Surrey, England, UK.[20][21] The Pakistani
investigations have tied other overseas properties to Zardari's
family. These include a $2.5 million manor in Normandy owned by
Zardari's parents, who had modest assets at the time of his marriage.
[15] Bhutto denied holding substantive overseas assets.

Bhutto and her husband until recently continued to face wide-ranging
charges of official corruption in connection with hundreds of
millions of dollars of "commissions" on government contracts and
tenders. But because of a power-sharing deal brokered in October 2007
between Bhutto and Musharraf, she and her husband had been granted
amnesty.[19] If it stands, this development could trigger a number of
Swiss banks to "unlock" accounts that were frozen in the late 1990s.
[15][19] The executive order could in principle be challenged by the
judiciary, although the judiciary's future was uncertain due to the
same recent developments.


Switzerland
On 23 July 1998, the Swiss Government handed over documents to the
government of Pakistan which relate to corruption allegations against
Benazir Bhutto and her husband.[22] The documents included a formal
charge of money laundering by Swiss authorities against Zardari. The
Pakistani government had been conducting a wide-ranging inquiry to
account for more than $13.7 million frozen by Swiss authorities in
1997 that was allegedly stashed in banks by Bhutto and her husband.
The Pakistani government recently filed criminal charges against
Bhutto in an effort to track down an estimated $1.5 billion she and
her husband are alleged to have received in a variety of criminal
enterprises.[23] The documents suggest that the money Zardari was
alleged to have laundered was accessible to Benazir Bhutto and had
been used to buy a diamond necklace for over $175,000.[24]

The PPP has responded by flatly denying the charges, suggesting that
Swiss authorities have been misled by false evidence provided by
Islamabad.

On 6 August 2003, Swiss magistrates found Bhutto and her husband
guilty of money laundering.[25] They were given six-month suspended
jail terms, fined $50,000 each and were ordered to pay $11 million to
the Pakistani government. The six-year trial concluded that Bhutto
and Zardari deposited in Swiss accounts $10 million given to them by
a Swiss company in exchange for a contract in Pakistan. The couple
said they would appeal. The Pakistani investigators say Zardari
opened a Citibank account in Geneva in 1995 through which they say he
passed some $40 million of the $100 million he received in payoffs
from foreign companies doing business in Pakistan.[26]

In October 2007, Daniel Zappelli, chief prosecutor of the canton of
Geneva, said he received the conclusions of a money laundering
investigation against former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto
on Monday, October 29, but it was unclear whether there would be any
further legal action against her in Switzerland.[27]


Poland
The Polish Government has given Pakistan 500 pages of documentation
relating to corruption allegations against Benazir Bhutto and her
husband. These charges are in regard to the purchase of 8,000
tractors in a 1997 deal.[28][29] According to Pakistani officials,
the Polish papers contain details of illegal commissions paid by the
tractor company in return for agreeing to their contract.[30] It was
alleged that the arrangement "skimmed" Rs 103 mn rupees ($2 million)
in kickbacks.[31] "The documentary evidence received from Poland
confirms the scheme of kickbacks laid out by Asif Zardari and Benazir
Bhutto in the name of (the) launching of Awami tractor scheme," APP
said. Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari allegedly received a 7.15%
commission on the purchase through their front men, Jens
Schlegelmilch and Didier Plantin of Dargal S.A., who received about
$1.969 million for supplying 5,900 Ursus tractors.[32]


France
Potentially the most lucrative deal alleged in the documents involved
the effort by Dassault Aviation, a French military contractor. French
authorities indicated in 1998 that Bhutto's husband, Zardari, offered
exclusive rights to Dassault to replace the air force's fighter jets
in exchange for a five percent commission to be paid to a corporation
in Switzerland controlled by Zardari.[33]

At the time, French corruption laws forbade bribery of French
officials but permitted payoffs to foreign officials, and even made
the payoffs tax-deductible in France. However, France changed this
law in 2000.[34]


Western Asia
In the largest single payment investigators have discovered, a gold
bullion dealer in the Western Asia was alleged to have deposited at
least $10 million into one of Zardari's accounts after the Bhutto
government gave him a monopoly on gold imports that sustained
Pakistan's jewellery industry. The money was allegedly deposited into
Zardari's Citibank account in Dubai.

Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast, stretching from Karachi to the border
with Iran, has long been a gold smugglers' haven. Until the beginning
of Bhutto's second term, the trade, running into hundreds of millions
of dollars a year, was unregulated, with slivers of gold called
biscuits, and larger weights in bullion, carried on planes and boats
that travel between the Persian Gulf and the largely unguarded
Pakistani coast.

Shortly after Bhutto returned as prime minister in 1993, a Pakistani
bullion trader in Dubai, Abdul Razzak Yaqub, proposed a deal: in
return for the exclusive right to import gold, Razzak would help the
government regularize the trade. In November 1994, Pakistan's
Commerce Ministry wrote to Razzak informing him that he had been
granted a license that made him, for at least the next two years,
Pakistan's sole authorized gold importer. In an interview in his
office in Dubai, Razzak acknowledged that he had used the license to
import more than $500 million in gold into Pakistan, and that he had
travelled to Islamabad several times to meet with Bhutto and Zardari.
But he denied that there had been any corruption or secret deals. "I
have not paid a single cent to Zardari," he said.

Razzak claims that someone in Pakistan who wished to destroy his
reputation had contrived to have his company wrongly identified as
the depositor. "Somebody in the bank has cooperated with my enemies
to make false documents," he said.


During exile
2002 election
The Bhutto-led Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) secured the highest
number of votes (28.42%) and eighty seats (23.16%) in the national
assembly in the October 2002 general elections.[35] Pakistan Muslim
League-Nawaz (PML-N) managed to win eighteen seats only. Some of the
elected candidates of Pakistan Peoples Party formed a faction of
their own, calling it PPP-Patriots which was being led by Makhdoom
Faisal Saleh Hayat, the former leader of Bhutto-led PPP. They later
formed a coalition government with Musharraf's party, PML-Q.


Early 2000s
In 2002, Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf amended Pakistan's
constitution to ban prime ministers from serving more than two terms.
This disqualifies Bhutto from ever holding the office again. This
move was widely considered to be a direct attack on former prime
ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. On 3 August 2003, Bhutto
became a member of Minhaj ul Quran International (An international
Muslim educational and welfare organization).[36]

From September 2004, Bhutto lived in Dubai, United Arab Emirates,
where she cared for her children and her mother, who was suffering
from Alzheimer's disease, travelling to give lectures and keeping in
touch with the Pakistan Peoples Party's supporters. She and her three
children were reunited with her husband and their father in December
2004 after more than five years.

On 27 January 2007 she was invited by the United States to speak to
President Bush and congressional and State Department officials.[37]

Bhutto appeared as a panellist on the BBC TV programme Question Time
in the UK in March 2007. She has also appeared on BBC current affairs
programme Newsnight on several occasions. She rebuffed comments made
by Muhammad Ijaz-ul-Haq in May 2007 regarding the knighthood of
Salman Rushdie, citing that he was calling for the assassination of
foreign citizens.

Bhutto had declared her intention to return to Pakistan within 2007,
which she did, in spite of Musharraf's statements of May 2007 about
not allowing her to return ahead of the country's general election,
due late 2007 or early 2008. It was speculated that she may have been
offered the office of Prime Minister again.[38][39][40]

Arthur Herman, a U.S. historian, in a controversial letter published
in The Wall Street Journal on 14 June 2007, in response to an article
by Bhutto highly critical of the president and his policies, has
described her as "One of the most incompetent leaders in the history
of South Asia", and asserted that she and other elites in Pakistan
hate Musharraf because he was a muhajir, the son of one of millions
of Indian Muslims who fled to Pakistan during partition in 1947.
Herman has claimed, "Although it was muhajirs who agitated for the
creation of Pakistan in the first place, many native Pakistanis view
them with contempt and treat them as third-class citizens."[41][42]
[43]

Nonetheless, as of mid-2007, the US appeared to be pushing for a deal
in which Musharraf would remain as president but step down as
military head, and either Bhutto or one of her nominees would become
prime minister.[44]

On 11 July 2007, the Associated Press, in an article about the
possible aftermath of the Red Mosque incident, wrote:

Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister and opposition leader
expected by many to return from exile and join Musharraf in a power-
sharing deal after year-end general elections, praised him for taking
a tough line on the Red Mosque. I'm glad there was no cease-fire with
the militants in the mosque because cease-fires simply embolden the
militants," she told Britain's Sky TV on Tuesday. "There will be a
backlash, but at some time we have to stop appeasing the
militants."[45]

This remark about the Red Mosque was seen with dismay in Pakistan as
reportedly hundreds of young students were burned to death and
remains are untraceable and cases are being heard in Pakistani
supreme court as a missing persons issue. This and subsequent support
for Musharaf led Elder Bhutto's comrades like Khar to criticize her
publicly.[citations needed]

Bhutto however advised Musharraf in an early phase of the latter's
quarrel with the Chief Justice, to restore him. Her PPP did not
capitalize on its CEC member, Aitzaz, the chief Barrister for the
Chief Justice, in successful restoration. Rather he was seen as a
rival and was isolated.


Possible deal with the Musharraf Government
Talks between Musharraf and Bhutto in 2004 likely resulted in her
husband's release.

In July 2007, some of Bhutto's frozen funds were released.[46] Bhutto
still faces significant charges of corruption. In an 8 August 2007
interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Bhutto revealed
the meeting focused on her desire to return to Pakistan for the 2008
elections, and of Musharraf retaining the Presidency with Bhutto as
Prime Minister. On 29 August 2007, Bhutto announced that Musharraf
would step down as chief of the army.[47][48] On 1 September Bhutto
vowed to return to Pakistan "very soon", regardless of whether or not
she reached a power-sharing deal with Musharraf before then.[49]

Many observers[attribution needed] consider such a deal improbable.
In summer 2002 Musharraf implemented a two-term limit on Prime
Ministers. Both Bhutto and Musharraf's other chief rival, Nawaz
Sharif, have already served two terms as Prime Minister.[50]
Musharraf's allies in parliament, especially the PMLQ, are unlikely
to reverse the changes to allow Prime Ministers to seek third terms,
nor to make particular exceptions for either Bhutto or Sharif.

On 2 October 2007, Gen. Pervez Musharraf named Lt. Gen. Ashfaq
Kayani, as vice chief of the army starting 8 October with the intent
that if Musharraf won the presidency and resigned his military post,
Kayani would become chief of the army. Meanwhile, Minister Sheikh
Rashid Ahmed stated that officials agreed to grant Benazir Bhutto
amnesty versus pending corruption charges. She has emphasized the
smooth transition and return to civilian rule and has asked Pervez
Musharaf to shed uniform.[51]

On 5 October 2007 Musharraf signed the National Reconciliation
Ordinance, giving amnesty to Bhutto and other political leaders—
except exiled former premier Nawaz Sharif—in all court cases against
them, including all corruption charges. The Ordinance came a day
before Musharraf faced the crucial presidential poll. Both Bhutto's
oppsition party, the PPP, and the ruling PMLQ, were involved in
negotiations beforehand about the deal.[52] In return, Bhutto and the
PPP agreed not to boycott the Presidential election.[53]

On 6 October 2007, Musharraf won a parliamentary election for
President. However, the Supreme Court ruled that no winner can be
officially proclaimed until it finishes deciding on whether it was
legal for Musharraf to run for President while remaining Army
General. Bhutto's PPP party did not join the other opposition
parties' boycott of the election, but did abstain from voting.[54]
Later Bhutto demanded security coverage on-par with the President's.
Bhutto also contracted foreign security firms for her protection.


Return to Pakistan and assassination attempts
While under house arrest, Benazir Bhutto speaks to supporters outside
her house.After eight years in exile in Dubai and London, Bhutto
returned to Karachi on 18 October 2007 to prepare for the 2008
national elections.[55][56]

En route to a rally in Karachi on 18 October 2007, two explosions
occurred shortly after Bhutto had landed and left Jinnah
International Airport. She was not injured but the explosions, later
found to be a suicide-bomb attack, killed 136 people and injured at
least 450. The dead included at least 50 of the security guards from
her Pakistan Peoples Party who had formed a human chain around her
truck to keep potential bombers away, as well as 6 police officers. A
number of senior officials were injured. Bhutto was escorted unharmed
from the scene.[57]

Bhutto later claimed that she had warned the Pakistani government
that suicide bomb squads would target her upon her return to Pakistan
and that the government had failed to act. She was careful not to
blame Pervez Musharraf for the attacks, accusing instead "certain
individuals [within the government] who abuse their positions, who
abuse their powers" to advance the cause of Islamic militants.
Shortly after the attempt on her life, Bhutto wrote a letter
Musharraf naming four persons whom she suspected of carrying out the
attack. Those named included Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, a rival PML-Q
politician and chief minister of Pakistan's Punjab province, Hamid
Gul, former director of the Inter-Services Intelligence, and Ijaz
Shah, the director general of the Intelligence Bureau, another of the
country's intelligence agencies. All those named are close associates
of General Musharraf. Bhutto has a long history of accusing parts of
the government, particularly Pakistan's premier military intelligence
agencies, of working against her and her party because they oppose
her liberal, secular agenda. Bhutto claimed that the ISI has for
decades backed militant Islamic groups in Kashmir and in Afghanistan.
[58]

There are discrepancies between the accounts published in western
newspapers, Pakistani tabloids, and eye witness accounts of the
assassination attempt. Bhutto's husband categorically refused to
accept that the suicide bombing was an attack by Al Qaeda or the
Taliban. Correspondingly, Pakistani Taliban leader Mehsud denied
responsibility and Jamaat Islami, an opponent of Bhutto, announced a
three days mourning period for the dead, thus lending credibility to
Bhutto's claims that the attack was engineered by close associates in
the government of General Musharraf.[citation needed]

Bhutto's associates describe an initial small grenade attack,
followed twenty seconds later by larger explosives, one right and and
one left of the truck carrying Bhutto; this was followed by a brief
burst of gun fire directed at vehicle's roof. The PPP sources claim
that yet another non-exploded bomb was fixed on a bridge which the
vehicle had already crossed[citation needed].

Some witnesses report there was a sizzling sound, apparently an
underground wire signal for the explosive devices. Bhutto escaped, as
she was protected by a 30-inch tall bullet-proof lining on the top of
the truck and was reportedly descending into the vehicle's interior
at the time; hence neither shrapnel nor bullets killed her. She was
also protected by a "human cordon" of supporters who had anticipated
suicide attacks and formed a chain around her to prevent potential
bombers from getting near her. The total number of injured, according
to PPP sources, stood at 1000, with at least 160 dead (The New York
Times claims 134 dead and about 450 injured). The PPP lodged a
complaint and FIR in protest, but was cautious in laying blame.
[citation needed]

A few days later, Bhutto's lawyer Senator Farooq H. Naik said he
received a letter threatening to kill his client. The letter also
claims to have links with al-Qaeda and followers of Osama bin Laden.


Response to 2007 State of Emergency
Main article: 2007 Pakistani state of emergency
On 3 November 2007 President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of
emergency, citing actions by the Supreme Court of Pakistan and
religious extremism in the nation. Bhutto returned to the country,
interrupting a visit to family in Dubai. She was greeted by
supporters chanting slogans at the airport. After staying in her
plane for several hours she was driven to her home in Lahore,
accompanied by hundreds of supporters. While acknowledging that
Pakistan faced a political crisis, she noted that Musharraf's
declaration of emergency, unless lifted, would make it very difficult
to have fair elections. She commented that "The extremists need a
dictatorship, and dictatorship needs extremists."[59][60][61]


House arrest
Wikinews has related news:
Pakistan lifts house arrest of former PM Benazir BhuttoOn 8 November
2007, Bhutto was placed under house arrest just a few hours before
she was due to lead and address a rally against the state of
emergency. She made some attempts to come out of house arrest but
police stopped her. All roads to her house were closed. The following
day, the Pakistani government announced that Bhutto's arrest warrant
had been withdrawn and that she would be free to travel and to appear
at public rallies. However, leaders of other opposition political
parties remained prohibited from speaking in public.[62]


Preparation for 2008 elections
On 24 November 2007, Bhutto filed her nomination papers for January's
Parliamentary elections; two days later, she filed papers in the
Larkana constituency for two regular seats. She did so as former
Pakistani Prime Minster Nawaz Sharif, following seven years of exile
in Saudi Arabia, made his much-contested return to Pakistan and bid
for candidacy.[63]

When sworn in again on 30 November 2007, this time as a civilian
president after relinquishing his post as military chief, Musharraf
announced his plan to lift the Pakistan's state of emergency rule on
16 December.[64] Bhutto welcomed the announcement and launched a
manifesto outlining her party's domestic issues. Bhutto told
journalists in Islamabad that her party, the Pakistan People's Party,
would focus on "the five E's": employment, education, energy,
environment, equality.[65]

On 4 December 2007, Bhutto met with Nawaz Sharif to publicize their
demand that Musharraf fulfill his promise to lift the state of
emergency before January's parliamentary elections, threatening to
boycott the vote if he failed to comply.[66] They promised to
assemble a committee which would present to Musharraf the list of
demands upon which their participation in the election was contingent.
[67]

On 8 December 2007 it was reported that three unidentified gunmen
stormed Mrs. Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party office in the southern
western province of Baluchistan.[68] It was confirmed by local police
that three of Bhutto's supporters were killed.


Assassination
Benazir Bhutto killed in suicide attack
On 27 December 2007, Benazir Bhutto was killed while entering a
vehicle upon leaving a political rally for the Pakistan People's
Party in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.[69][70] A suicidal assassin reportedly
fired shots in Bhutto's direction just prior to detonating an
explosive pellet-ridden vest, killing approximately 22 people and
wounding many more.[71][72][73]

The attack occurred just after Bhutto left the rally, where she had
given a campaign address to party supporters in the run-up to the
January 2008 parliamentary elections.[74] She was pronounced dead at
5:15 p.m. local time at Rawalpindi General Hospital.[75]

Conflicting news stories led to a confusion regarding whether she
suffered from gunshot wounds or received her wounds due to shrapnel.
AFP quoted Javed Cheema as saying she may have been killed by pellets
packed into the suicide bomber's vest. However, the AP quoted a PPP
security adviser as saying she was shot in the neck and chest as she
got into her vehicle, before the explosion.[76]

Early reports from the hospital stated that Bhutto had a bullet in
the back of the neck that damaged her spinal cord before exiting from
the side of her head. Another bullet pierced the back of her shoulder
and came out through her chest. Bhutto was given an open heart
massage, but the main cause of death was damage to her spinal cord.
[77]

No official announcement has yet been made. No claims of
responsibility were initially reported.

The PPP's Makhdoom Amin Fahim stated that Bhutto could have survived
the blast if she had not stood up in her vehicle. Fahim was sitting
in the back seat when she was attacked. She was shot when she stood
up by her vehicle's door.[78]

Some news reports include video purported to be Bhutto's departure
from the rally,[79] already secured in her bulletproof Toyota Mega
Cruiser.

Video[80] shows the last moments of the former Prime Minister of
Pakistan. Video from the scene also shows several people being loaded
into ambulances. There were quite a few cameras rolling, but as of
yet, no video has been shown of the actual shooting.

The United Nations Security Council held an emergency session and
later said it "unanimously condemned" the assassination.[81] White
House spokesman Scott Stanzel condemned "the acts of violence" in the
assassination.[82] United States President George W. Bush called it
a "cowardly act by murderous extremists" and said the "criminals"
responsible "must be brought to justice".[83]

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned the acts saying that it
was "a sad day for democracy" and "a tragic hour for Pakistan".[84]

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said "We firmly
condemn this terrorist act, we express our condolences to Benazir
Bhutto's relatives and loved ones, and we hope that the Pakistani
leadership will manage to take necessary steps to ensure stability in
the country".[85]

The Prime Minister of neighbouring India, Dr. Manmohan Singh,
expressed deep shock at the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Dr Singh
stated, "The manner of her going is a reminder of the common dangers
that our region faces from cowardly acts of terrorism and of the need
to eradicate this dangerous threat."[86]

Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, said, "This was an
abhorrent act of terror and we hope that [the] government of Pakistan
will act to bring the perpetrators to justice. And this cannot be
allowed to permit any delay in the return of Pakistan to full
democracy, something the people of Pakistan have been waiting for for
far too long."


Benazir Bhutto's books
** Benazir Bhutto, (1983), Pakistan: The gathering storm, Vikas Pub.
House, ISBN 0706924959
** Benazir Bhutto (1989). Daughter of the East. Hamish Hamilton. ISBN
0-241-12398-4.
** Benazir Bhutto (1989). Daughter of Destiny: An Autobiography.
Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-66983-4.

Books about Benazir Bhutto
** W.F.Pepper, (1983), Benazir Bhutto, WF Pepper, ISBN 0946781001
Rafiq Zakaria (1990). The Trial of Benazir. Sangam Books. ISBN 0-861-
32265-7.
** Katherine M. Doherty, Caraig A. Doherty , (1990), Benazir Bhutto
(Impact Biographies Series), Franklin Watts, ISBN 0531109364
** Rafiq Zakaria, (1991), The Trial of Benazir Bhutto: An Insight
into the Status of Women in Islam, Eureka Pubns, ISBN 9679783200
** Diane Sansevere-Dreher, (1991), Benazir Bhutto (Changing Our World
Series), Bantam Books (Mm), ISBN 0553158570
** Christina Lamb, (1992), Waiting for Allah, Penguin Books Ltd, ISBN
0140143343
** M FATHERS, (1992), Biography of Benazir Bhutto, W.H. Allen /
Virgin Books, ISBN 024554965X
** Elizabeth Bouchard, (1994), Benazir Bhutto: Prime Minister
(Library of Famous Women), Blackbirch Pr Inc, ISBN 1567110274
** Iqbal Akhund, (2000), Trial and Error: The Advent and Eclipse of
Benazir Bhutto, OUP Pakistan, ISBN 0195791606
** Libby Hughes, (2000), Benazir Bhutto: From Prison to Prime
Minister, Backinprint.Com, ISBN 0595003885
** Iqbal Akhund, (2002), Benazir Hukoomat: Phela Daur, Kia Khoya, Kia
Paya?, OUP Pakistan, ISBN 0195794214
** Mercedes Anderson, (2004), Benazir Bhutto (Women in Politics),
Chelsea House Publishers, ISBN 0791077322
** Mary Englar, (2007), Benazir Bhutto: Pakistani Prime Minister and
Activist, Compass Point Books, ISBN 0756517982
** Ayesha Siddiqa Agha, (2007), Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan's
Military Economy, Pluto Press, ISBN 0745325459


Quotes
"I find that whenever I am in power, or my father was in power,
somehow good things happen. The economy picks up, we have good rains,
water comes, people have crops. I think the reason this happens was
that we want to give love and we receive love."[87]
"I don't fear death...I don't think it can happen unless God wants it
to happen because so many people have tried to kill me."[88]

References
^ Bhutto returns to Pakistan after 8 years (2007-10-18).
^ "Benazir Bhutto 'killed in blast'", BBC News, 2007-12-27.
^ Benazir Bhutto assassinated (2007-12-27).
^ Story of Pakistan — Benazir Bhutto (2003-06-01).
^ a b c Bookrags Encyclopedia of World Biography entry.
^ Encyclopædia Britannica entry via about.com
^ WIC Biography - Benazir Bhutto.
^ Pakistan's Premier Bhutto was Put Under House Arrest, New York
Times, November 5, 1996, by John F. Burns
^ Pakistan Frees Widow And Daughter of Bhutto, New York Times, May
29, 1979
^ Pakistan Supreme Court Upholds Benazir Bhutto's Dismissal on the
basis of Corruption and Extra-Judicial Killings of MQM Workers and
Supporters.
^ Pakistan seeks arrest of Bhutto, BBC News, 26 January 2006.
^ AP: Pakistani court hears cases on Musharraf.
^ S. Coll, "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan,
and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001",
Penguin Press HC, U.S. 2004
^ C'wealth apprised of Asif's `illegal' detention - Dawn Pakistan.
^ a b c Bhutto Clan Leaves Trail of Corruption in Pakistan, by John
F. Burns, The New York Times, 1998-01-09
^ Bhutto's Husband Appeals May 11, 1999
^ World News Briefs; Bhutto's Jailed Husband Sworn In as Senator
December 30, 1997
^ The Bhutto saga takes a new turn.
^ a b c Corruption amnesty may release millions for Bhutto, The
Sunday Times, 2007-10-14
^ Asif Zardari lays claim to 4-mn-pound UK estate, The Times of
India, 2004-08-22
^ £4 m Surrey mansion in Bhutto `corruption' row, The Sunday Times,
2004-11-21
^ South Asia Bhutto 'corruption' documents reach Pakistan, Thursday,
23 July 1998
^ Swiss Want Bhutto Indicted in Pakistan for Money Laundering, August
20, 1998, Thursday, by Elizabeth Olson
^ Swiss Want Bhutto Indicted in Pakistan for Money Laundering, 20
August 1998, Thursday, by Elizabeth Olson
^ Asia: Pakistan: Bhutto Sentenced In Switzerland 6 August 2003
^ THE BHUTTO MILLIONS; A Background Check Far From Ordinary, 9
January 1998, Friday, By JOHN F. BURNS (NYT)
^ Swiss prosecutor gets case against Bhutto, 29 October 2007, Monday,
by The Associated Press
^ £4 m Surrey mansion in Bhutto `corruption' row 21 November 2004
^ Poland gives Pak papers on $ 2-mn Bhutto bribe 6 May 1999
^ World: South Asia Poland linked to Bhutto corruption charge,
Friday, 7 May 1999
^ Bhutto's Husband Appeals 11 May 1999
^ NAB says Swiss order names Benazir: Ursus tractor case 22 July 2004
^ Sweet Economic-Political Deal.
^ Steps taken by France to implement and enforce the Convention on
Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International
Business Transactions.
^ 2002 election results by ECP (Election Commission of Pakistan).
^ Minhaj-ul-Quran International, By Mr. Jawed Iqbal
^ Pakistan Times, Pakistan's ex-PM Benazir Bhutto to meet President
Bush, by Khalida Mazhar, 25 Jan 2007
^ Former Leader Talks of Return To Pakistan, and Maybe Power June 4,
2007
^ Bhutto claims Sharif agreed to power-sharing deal 18 Jun 2007
^ Back to Bhutto? 28 June 2007
^ Bhutto gets renewed interest in Pakistan, U.S. may accept ex-prime
minister -- will her country? July 1, 2007
^ Why Bhutto and the Elites Hate Musharraf 14 June 2007
^ Benazir, elites hate Musharraf because of his ethnicity, claims US
author June 15, 2007
^ Back to Bhutto? June 28, 2007
^ Mosque Crisis May Boost Musharraf's Hand July 11, 2007
^ Bhutto's accounts de-frozen for deal with Musharraf: reports -
India News.
^ Bhutto: 'Musharraf has agreed to quit as military chief' 29 Aug
2007
^ Bhutto Expects Musharraf to Quit as Military Chief 29 Aug 2007
^ BBC NEWS, Bhutto vows early Pakistan return.
^ Pakistan Court Bars Former Prime Minister From Election.
^ New York Times, Maneuvering Before Vote in Pakistan.
^ Musharraf signs national reconciliation ordinance.
^ Musharraf wins presidential vote.
^ BBC NEWS, Musharraf 'wins presidency vote'.
^ "Supporters flock to Karachi for Bhutto's return", CBC News, 2007-
10-17.
^ "Huge crowds greet Bhutto return", BBC News, 2007-10-18. Retrieved
on 2007-10-18.
^ "After Bombing, Bhutto Assails Officials' Ties", New York Times,
2007-10-20.
^ "After Bombing, Bhutto Assails Officials' Ties", New York Times,
2007-10-20.
^ Musharraf declares emergency in Pakistan, Matthew Pennington, AP,
November 3, 2007
^ "Pakistani opposition leader Bhutto returns to Karachi publisher=PR
Inside", 2007-11-03. Retrieved on 2007-11-03.
^ "Benazir returns to Pak, faces no problem", IBN Live, 2007-11-03.
Retrieved on 2007-11-03.
^ Bhutto killed in suicide attack December 27, 2007
^ Sharif, Bhutto set aside differences (2007-12-04).
^ Musharraf: State of emergency will end before elections (2007-11-
29).
^ Pakistan's Bhutto launches election manifesto (2007-11-30).
^ Sharif, Bhutto and the ex-general (2007-11-29).
^ Ultimatum Delivered: Pakistan's leading opposition leaders have
united (sort of) against President Pervez Musharraf. But their impact
will probably be minimal (2007-12-04).
^ Gunmen kill Bhutto's supporters (2007-12-08).
^ Bhutto killed in suicide attack (HTML). Al Jazeera English.
Retrieved on 2007-12-27.
^ Benazir Bhutto is dead Reuters video
^ "Benazir Bhutto Assination NBC News Coverage", NBC, 2007-12-27.
Retrieved on 2007-12-27.
^ "Benazir Bhutto Assination CBS News Coverage", CBS, 2007-12-27.
Retrieved on 2007-12-27.
^ "Benazir Bhutto Assination ABC News Coverage", ABC, 2007-12-27.
Retrieved on 2007-12-27.
^ "Bhutto 'critical' after blast", Cable News Network (CNN), Turner
Broadcasting System Inc., 2007-12-27. Retrieved on 2007-12-27.
(English)
^ "Bhutto killed by rally suicide bomb", The Press Association, 2007-
12-27. Retrieved on 2007-12-27.
^ "Benazir Bhutto killed in attack", BBC News, 2007-12-27.
^ news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3287311.ece.
^ [1]
^ "Benazir Bhutto entering bullet-proof vehicle", Fox News, 2007-12-
27.
^ "Benazir Bhutto Assassination: Video Shows Last Moments Of Former
PM", The Post Chronicle, 2007-12-27. Retrieved on 2007-12-27.
^ "BBC News Report Benazir Bhutto killed in attack", BBC, 2007-12-27.
Retrieved on 2007-12-27.
^ "White House condemns violence against Benazir Bhutto FOX News
Coverage", FoxNews, 2007-12-27. Retrieved on 2007-12-27.
^ Video: Bush Condemns Bhutto Assassination. Reuters (2007-12-27).
Retrieved on 2007-12-27.
^ "Bhutto killed by 'cowards': Brown", AFP Agence France-Presse, 2007-
12-27. Retrieved on 2007=12=27.
^ "Bhutto's death heightens democracy concerns", CNN, 2007-12-27.
^ PIB (2007-12-27). "PRIME MINISTER'S STATEMENT ON THE DEATH OF MRS.
BENAZIR BHUTTO PIB". Press release. Retrieved on 2007-12-27.
^ 'I never asked for power' The Guardian, 15 August 2002
^ Destiny's Daughter The Times


===================


Death toll rises in Bhutto attack
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/10/18/pakistan.explosions/index.
html


KARACHI, Pakistan (CNN) -- At least 136 people were killed and more
than 387 wounded around midnight Thursday in a suicide bombing near a
motorcade carrying former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto,
who returned to the country earlier in the day after eight years of
self-imposed exile, according to hospital and police sources.

Bhutto and those with her were unhurt, and her companions said she
reached her family home safely. Video footage showed her exiting the
bullet- and blast-proof vehicle after the blasts.

Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, called Bhutto Friday to
condemn the bombing and assure her that an independent investigation
will be completed as soon as possible, his office said.

She apparently had moved from the roof of the vehicle inside and
downstairs just moments before the blasts.

"I can see body parts strewn all over the road," said CNN's Dan
Rivers, at the scene. "There are dead bodies everywhere. ... It is a
large-scale attack, by the looks of things."

Authorities believe the suicide bomber was on foot and threw a
grenade to attract attention before setting of the second, major
blast, Karachi police chief Azhar Farooqi told CNN. The bomber is
believed to have acted alone.

Police do not think a car bomb was involved, he said. Nearby cars
were burned but police do not believe a bomb was inside the car.

He would not say who authorities believe was behind the bombing,
citing the ongoing investigation.

"Although the truck that Benazir Bhutto was riding on was surrounded
by police cars, so the suicide bomber could not get onto the truck
and could not get anywhere near it, so he blew himself up and that
has caused many casualties, mostly among the policemen who were
riding beside the truck," Tariq Azim Khan, Pakistani information
minister, told CNN.

Other officials said at least one bomb apparently had been placed in
a car on the street where Bhutto's supporters had gathered to see her
convoy pass. One witness told Rivers he saw a car with three people
inside explode. Watch witnesses describe what happened »

Video footage showed a chaotic scene after the explosions, with
crowds of people trying to flee as emergency vehicles jammed streets.
Other footage showed wounded victims writhing on a road, awaiting
medical attention, and at least one fire apparently sparked by the
blasts.

The windshield of the vehicle Bhutto was riding in was smashed by the
blasts, Rivers said, and a vehicle that was following hers was burned
out. The scene, he said, was "absolutely horrendous," with blood
running in streams down the street.

Because the streets were crowded with supporters who had turned out
to greet Bhutto, ambulances had difficulty reaching the scene
immediately after the blasts. Onlookers resorted to ferrying the
injured to hospitals in private cars.

Rivers said he and his crew, filming the convoy just before the
blasts, remarked on the lack of security surrounding it. It was
possible to walk right up to the side of her vehicle without being
stopped, he said.

Qasim Zia, a leader of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, was riding
on Bhutto's vehicle and told CNN one of his bodyguards was killed and
another seriously hurt. The wounded included at least 20 leaders of
the party, he said, and most of those killed were members of security
forces or police who were surrounding Bhutto's truck at the time of
the explosions.

Had it not been for heightened security measures in place, Bhutto
could have been wounded or killed, he said.

The bomb detonated as Bhutto's motorcade was nearing the tomb of
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who led Pakistan to independence and championed
equal rights for all Pakistani citizens regardless of their religion.
Bhutto had planned to stop and pray at the tomb, then deliver a
speech to her supporters.

The United States was swift to condemn what it called "terrorist
attacks in Karachi during peaceful political demonstrations."

"There is no political cause that can justify the murder of innocent
people," State Department spokesman Tom Casey said in a written
statement.

White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, "extremists will not be
allowed to stop Pakistanis from selecting their representatives
through an open and democratic process."

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also issued a statement
condeming the bombing, and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband
said he was "appalled" by the "horrific" attacks.

The terrorist watch group IntelCenter said the death toll from the
bombing places it among the top 10 deadliest terror attacks within
the past nine years.

=======================


Bhutto: Attack won't stop campaign
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/10/19/pakistan.explosions/


KARACHI, Pakistan (CNN) -- Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir
Bhutto has called the deadly terrorist attack on her convoy "an
attack on democracy" and vowed it would not deter her political
campaign or her fight for human rights.

Bhutto, 54, hopes to earn a third term as prime minister in January's
parliamentary elections.

She returned to Pakistan on Thursday after a self-imposed, eight-year
exile.

"What does the attack last night signify? The attack was more an
attack on the unity and integrity of the country than on any
individual or any one political party," Bhutto said at a news
conference on Friday, a day after the terror attack that killed 136
people.

"It was an attack on Pakistan itself. It was an attack on their
political rights, on the political process and on democracy itself.
The attack last night was a message sent by the enemies of democracy
to all the political parties of the country.

"It was intended to intimidate and blackmail all the political forces
and elements working for democracy and human rights in the country.
It was a warning not only to me and the PPP (People's Political
Party) but to all political parties -- indeed, to the entire civil
society."

After the blast, police retrieved the head of a possible suspect,
which was being analyzed at a forensics lab.

Police said they were due to release a sketch soon and are offering
about $83,000 (5 million rupees) for information leading to possible
arrests.

Bhutto was traveling from the airport after returning to Pakistan
when the bomber struck her convoy late Thursday. She was not hurt.

A defiant Bhutto on Friday said she did not blame the government for
the attack, but complained of poor security preparations. She blamed
extremists who oppose her support for Pakistan's Western allies.

No-one has claimed responsibility, and police have named no possible
suspects or groups.

However, U.S. State Department officials, quoting the Pakistanis,
told CNN Friday they believe there is a "strong al Qaeda connection"
to the attacks. The officials said U.S. agents are helping Pakistan
in the investigation.

One senior department official said the attack "bears the hallmarks"
of an al Qaeda attack, and noted the group has threatened Bhutto
before.

The Pakistanis have told U.S. officials that they were aware of three
or four al Qaeda-related cells seeking to undertake an attack on
Bhutto's return. The attack, officials said, is frightening because
it shows how much freedom al Qaeda has to move around in Pakistan.

Authorities believe the suicide bomber was on foot and threw a
grenade to attract attention before setting off the second, major
blast, Karachi's police chief, Azhar Farooqi, told CNN on Thursday.

The bomber is believed to have acted alone. Police do not think a car
bomb was involved, although nearby cars were burned.

Bhutto said streetlights on the route were not working, which
hindered security guards. Authorities have promised to look into that
claim.

Bhutto says she intends to continue her political campaign for prime
minister, despite the potential dangers.

Her return home was made possible by Pakistan's embattled president,
Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who earlier this month agreed to drop
outstanding corruption charges against her and a number of other
politicians as part of his own bid to stay in power.

Bhutto said Friday she is continuing to negotiate with Musharraf to
promote democracy in a possible power-sharing deal. There is a
parliamentary election in January in which Bhutto hopes to win a
third term as prime minister.

CNN correspondent Dan Rivers said Bhutto in her speech Friday listed
three other groups, in addition to the Taliban in Pakistan, that she
believed posed the most danger to her and her cause: al Qaeda, the
Taliban in Afghanistan and a suicide team from Karachi that she did
not describe.

Meanwhile, a bomb exploded at a bus station in southwestern Pakistan
Saturday, killing at least seven people and wounding 20 others,
police told CNN.

The explosion occurred in Dera Bugti, an insurgency-hit tribal town
in the southwestern Baluchistan province. Police have since cordoned
off the area and are investigating the incident


==========


Bhutto eyes Pakistan return, fears assassination
The former prime minister's plans to seek a third term may be
derailed by court case on amnesty for corruption charges.
By Simon Montlake
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1015/p99s01-wosc.html


Bangkok, Thailand - Exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is
due to return to Pakistan on Thursday under a tentative power-sharing
deal with President Pervez Musharraf, who was reelected last week to
another term in office. Bhutto plans to contest parliamentary
elections in January and seek a third term as prime minister. Her
path was cleared recently when General Musharraf declared an amnesty
on outstanding corruption charges against Ms. Bhutto and her husband,
as well as other politicians accused of graft prior to Pakistan's
1999 coup.

But both that sweeping amnesty and Musharraf's reelection face
challenges in Pakistan's increasingly assertive courts that could
derail their pact. The Supreme Court is considering the legality of
Musharraf running for president while retaining his role as Army
chief. It's also hearing petitions against the amnesty for
politicians, including Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People's Party
(PPP), the country's largest.

Now, Bhutto has told the Guardian newspaper that she suspects that
retired military officers aligned to Islamic extremists could be
plotting her assassination, an allegation that a government minister
called a "ridiculous claim." Elaborate security measures are already
in place for when Bhutto returns to Pakistan, including thousands of
security forces and bulletproof cars to shield her. A Taliban
commander, Baitullah Masood, has threatened to deploy suicide bombers
against her, but Bhutto told the newspaper that the real threat came
from within the powerful military establishment.

"I'm not worried about Baitullah Masood, I'm worried about the threat
within the government," she said. "People like Baitullah Masood are
just pawns. It is those forces behind him that have presided over the
rise of extremism and militancy in my country."

Ms Bhutto singled out as her most potent enemy retired military
officers "who have fought the jihad".

"They have a lot of supporters and sympathisers within the echelons
of administration and intelligence," she said.

Pakistani government officials have urged Bhutto to delay her return
until after the Supreme Court rules on the presidential amnesty,
Agence France-Presse reports. Deputy Information Minister Tariq Azim
said Bhutto could face corruption charges if the court overturned the
amnesty, known as a "reconciliation ordinance."

"If the court declares the national reconciliation ordinance null and
void, then all cases and charges against her will be reinstated.

"Such a situation could create political turmoil," he told AFP. "But
she is free to come back, this is just friendly advice," he added.

Bhutto is a scion of Pakistan's preeminent political dynasty and a
survivor of the country's treacherous politics, the British
Broadcasting Corp. reports. Twice elected as prime minister, she was
dismissed for corruption on both occasions by the president. Her
father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was ousted by a military coup in 1977
and executed two years later. Ms. Bhutto spent five years in jail,
mostly in solitary confinement, then set up an opposition party in
exile. She returned to Pakistan and won her first election in 1988.

At the height of her popularity – shortly after her first election –
she was one of the most high-profile women leaders in the world.

Young and glamorous, she successfully portrayed herself as a
refreshing contrast to the overwhelmingly male-dominated political
establishment.

But after her second fall from power, her name came to be seen by
some as synonymous with corruption and bad governance.

Musharraf's amnesty, if it goes ahead, could be lucrative for Bhutto
and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who are believed to be the
beneficiaries of about $1.5 billion in frozen Swiss bank accounts,
The Sunday Times (UK) reports. Bhutto has denied holding any overseas
bank accounts, including the disputed Swiss accounts.

Bhutto and Zardari were alleged to have amassed a fortune from
kickbacks on government contracts during her two terms as prime
minister. Their assets allegedly included a 10-bedroom, mock-Tudor
Surrey mansion and, according to anticorruption investigators, £740m
in Swiss bank accounts.

Hassan Waseem Afzal, a highflying civil servant who led the Bhutto
investigation for 10 years, said last week that he believed the deal
with Musharraf to drop the corruption charges would unlock the frozen
accounts.

The accounts were registered in the names of Bhutto's mother, Begum
Nusrat Bhutto, and Zardari, a former minister. But Afzal said the
Pakistan government and a Swiss magistrate had obtained evidence that
Bhutto herself was a beneficiary ….

Bhutto and Zardari, who spent seven years in prison in Pakistan on
corruption charges, were convicted in absentia by a Swiss court in
2003. The Swiss magistrate found that during her second term as prime
minister she enriched herself or her husband with kickbacks from a
government contract with two Swiss companies.

Amid the political dealmaking in Islamabad, Pakistani troops are
battling armed militants in the tribal belt on the Pakistani-Afghan
border. Last week, the fighting intensified in North Waziristan, with
hundreds dead. A report by Asia Times highlights the US government's
role in brokering a political deal that keeps Pakistan fully
engagedin the battle against Taliban forces that threaten stability
in Afghanistan.

Pakistan's political transition is the most important link in US
strategy in the southwest Asian region and to some extent in the
Middle East. The US State Department's Richard Boucher has visited
Pakistan and United Arab Emirates (where Bhutto has been living) six
times in the past nine months in an attempt to reconcile Musharraf
and Bhutto and thus ensure a friendly government in Islamabad, thus
retaining an ally in the "war on terror" as well as curbing any
adventurous designs by the Pakistani military and safeguarding
Pakistan's nuclear assets.

While last week's political machinations were under way in Pakistan,
the US was providing intelligence to Islamabad about a massive
regrouping of the Taliban in the Pakistani tribal areas in
preparation for a big campaign against NATO forces in southeast
Afghanistan. The US feared that a disruption of the political
dialogue would mean a hiatus in Pakistan's political transition, and
delay military operations against the thousands of Taliban and al-
Qaeda forces gathering in North Waziristan before launching attacks
on the Afghan provinces of Khost, Paktia, Paktika, Gardez and Ghazni,
and then Kabul with unending waves of suicide missions. If the
Taliban were allowed to hatch their plans unmolested during a
political vacuum in Islamabad, Washington believed the Taliban would
seize the upper hand in Afghanistan.

By returning to Pakistan on Musharraf's terms, Bhutto is taking a
gamble on her grass roots popularity, according to The Chicago
Tribune. Her association with Musharraf could tarnish her reputation
as a politician who stands up to the military.

Her popularity has also taken a hit since she started talking with
Musharraf, whose presidential win in front of parliament Oct. 6 is
being challenged in court. In July, the two met in Abu Dhabi, after
months of rumors of negotiations. Only 35 percent of 4,000 Pakistanis
surveyed in late August and early September support a power-sharing
deal between Bhutto and Musharraf, according to a poll released
Thursday by the International Republican Institute.


========


2 blasts strike crowd celebrating Bhutto's return
Ex-Pakistan prime minister not hurt, but more than 120 killed
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21344367/


KARACHI, Pakistan - A suicide bombing in a crowd welcoming former
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto killed at least 123 people Thursday
night, shattering her celebratory procession through Pakistan's
biggest city after eight years in exile.

Two explosions went off near a truck carrying Bhutto, but police and
officials of her party said she was not injured and was hurried to
her house. An Associated Press photo showed a dazed-looking Bhutto
being helped away.

There wer

(Message over 64k, truncated.)