THAT the killing of Benazir Bhutto would be mired in controversies was a foregone conclusion. As Daily Times editor Najam Sethi pointed out in a signed article, the truth behind every political assassination in Pakistan has been evasive, either because it has not been investigated or because the findings of the investigation have not been made public.
In Benazirs case, mystery surrounds even the exact cause of her death, what to talk of who killed her and why. Also, the fact is that doctors did not carry out a post-mortem.
The first reports from the scene, as recounted by some eyewitnesses, spoke of her escaping unhurt. But as it turned out, she fell back into her car from the sunroof. Media reports from the Rawalpindi General Hospital, quoting unnamed doctors and also Benazirs spokesperson Farahtullah Babar, said she died of two gunshot wounds in her neck and head. Some reports said she was killed by a single bullet in her neck.
Piecing it together from eyewitness accounts, several media outlets put out reports that the suicide-bomber had fired at her before detonating himself. But that very night, Tariq Azeem, who was the Information Minister in the dissolved Pakistan Muslim League (Q) government, appeared in a television programme to say that the PPP leader died not of a bullet but of a shrapnel wound from the bombing.
The News carried a report on December 28 saying President Pervez Musharraf was briefed at a high-level security meeting after the killing that Benazir died from a shrapnel wound. But an Urdu newspaper, Ausaf, carried a report that the bullets were fired from a police vehicle in the direction of Benazir.
Caretaker Interior Minister Lt. Gen. (retd.) Hamid Nawaz quickly dismissed the report as fiction and, in an interview to Dawn News television, ruled out a bullet injury. He said X-rays showed no bullets lodged in her body, but an irregular wound on the right side of her head pointed to a shrapnel injury. It had caused a fracture in the skull and brain material was oozing out of the wound, he said quoting from a medical report signed by seven doctors at the hospital to back up his claim.
Later in the day, the story changed yet again. This time the government said that neither a bullet nor a bomb caused Benazirs death. She died from the lever of the sunroof, which she hit as the impact of the explosion pulled her back into the car. The lever, a spokesman of the Interior Ministry said, had caused the fracture of her skull. He said the report of the doctors who examined her also confirmed this. The government says three gunshots were fired before the suicide bombing but none of them hit her. The bombing itself took place on the left side of the vehicle and, therefore, could not have caused an injury on the right side of her skull. The car lever, according to the government, was blood-stained. From all this, the spokesman said, it was clear that the lever had caused the fracture and her eventual death, and he warned against any further ambiguities. For the bombing and the shooting, the government blamed Beithullah Mehsud, the Al Qaeda-Taliban commander based in Waziristan. But with its constantly changing story, the government ended up setting off more speculation than ending any.
Predictably, the PPP was quick to reject this new claim. Babar accused the government of trying to change the direction of the investigations and reiterated that she had died of two bullet injuries. After the attack on Benazirs Karachi rally on October 18 that killed 140 people, the PPP demanded that the government call in Western forensic experts. Babar said had that demand been met, Benazir would not have died.
Two inquiries have been ordered: a judicial investigation and a departmental inquiry headed by a senior police official. But with the government caught in a serious credibility crisis, its sunroof lever claim has sown doubts in peoples minds that it definitely has something to hide. A thousand conspiracy theories are now doing the rounds, fuelled, of course, by Benazirs own statement after the Karachi blast that some Zia-era remnants in Pakistans establishment were out to get her. She had also pointed a finger at three individuals in the Musharraf regime, including Intelligence Bureau chief Ejaz Shah and the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) leader Chaudhary Shujat Hussain, saying that she had written to Musharraf that if anything were to happen to her, these individuals would be to blame.
As with the Karachi blasts, conspiracy theorists say that the government is blaming Islamist militants because it is the easiest way out of a proper investigation. Questions are also being raised about why fire engines were in such a hurry to hose down the site of the bomb attack before investigators could begin collecting forensic evidence. In Karachi, the site was washed off the next morning; in Rawalpindi, the fire engines arrived within an hour of the blast and finished cleaning it all up by 9 p.m., in less than four hours after the attack.
There are also questions about why there was no post-mortem. The government says Benazirs husband did not want one and that an external post-mortem conducted by the doctors was sufficient. Critics say the government should have insisted on a proper post-mortem, considering the gravity of the crime. If it had nothing to hide, that would have helped in clearing its name.
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