The Benazir Bhutto assassination case has surfaced again in Pakistan. Before the details are forgotten here they are. On 27 December 2007, Benazir, having addressed more than ten thousand supporters in Liaquat Park, Rawalpindi, stood on the back seat, her head and shoulders sticking out above her armour-plated Toyota’s roof escape hatch.
But the density of the crowd was so great that the Toyota could hardly move. An assassin was waiting and saw his chance. A Pashtun, Bilal aka Saeed, fired three shots in less than a second from his automatic pistol. On the second shot, Benazir fell through the escape hatch into the vehicle. The gunman then set off his suicide bomb. British scientists who later analysed what was left of his body estimated his age at 15.
Many Muslim children are handed over by their impoverished parents to madrasas. They are given immaculate white clothes, any amount of good food, excellent accommodation and hours of brainwashing based on religious teaching and the desire to reach Paradise through martyrdom. The older students are instructed to always bow with respect to suicide recruits. It takes a few months to persuade an 18-year-old young man to mount a suicide attack.
Rumours abounded on who the persons behind Benazir’s assassin were. The ISI, Taliban, al-Qaeda, Pervez Musharraf and even her own husband Asif Ali Zardari were candidates. There were many powerful interests in Pakistan that wanted her dead, that too, around 10 days before the election. Predictably, Benazir’s Pakistan People’s Party swept the polls soon after her murder and her husband Zardari assumed full power.
The breakthrough came when police arrested another 15-year-old boy, Aitzaz Shah. His confession led to other arrests and helped the police put together a picture of how Bilal aka Saeed came to be in a position to kill Bhutto.
Three other conspirators were also involved. One was Husnain Gul, a madrasa student who was trained at a camp in Northwest Pakistan. When he was arrested he had a hand grenade and clothes belonging to Bilal. In his confession, Gul described how he had persuaded his cousin Muhammad Rafaqat, to join him; together, they came to Rawalpindi. Gul carried out a reconnaissance of Liaquat Park, then went to the bus station to meet the two designated suicide bombers—Bilal and Ikramullah who had travelled with a third person, Nasrullah aka Ahmed.
On the morning of the assassination, Rafaqat and Nasrullah took another look at Liaquat Park while Gul gave Bilal and Ikramullah suicide jackets, pistols, ammunition and hand grenades. The plan was that Bilal would stand by the exit gate and try to kill Benazir. If he failed, Ikramullah would try to kill her instead.
Now it was the job of the state to investigate, locate and prosecute the conspirators behind the five-man juvenile assassination team. Since Zardari had come to power, everyone assumed that due to his Sindhi honour code, which sets a high value on revenge, and with the full power of the state at his disposal, Zardari would be able to bring his wife’s killers to justice.
Within two hours of the assassination, the DIG of the Rawalpindi police, Saud Aziz, ordered fire engines to wash down the crime scene. He said the blood was washed away to prevent Benazir’s supporters from daubing themselves in her blood. This is bogus as Benazir bled in the Toyota. The only blood on the street was that of the assassin and those 24 bystanders he killed. The UN inquiry was told that Saud Aziz received instructions from a senior army officer ordering him to wash down the crime scene. The Toyota was also cleaned even though the police had full custody of it!
Rehman Malik had been Benazir’s closest confidant during exile and her security-in- charge later. Malik’s bullet-proof Mercedes was the back-up car that day if she needed to be evacuated. Despite having responsibility for her security, Malik reacted to the explosion by ordering his driver to leave the area and head for Islamabad. Once he got there he gave on TV contradictory accounts of how he had reacted to the attack.
His version changed from ‘I was about four feet away and I turned around and Mohtarma’s (Benazir’s) car was trying to get out, and we led that car and got away and went to the hospital and I was present in the hospital’ to ‘When the bomb blast happened there was a distance of no more than eight feet between my car and Mohtarma’s car.
So I said let’s head towards Islamabad—in the meantime we called the hospital.’ When he became the new minister of the interior he decreed that the relevant files should not be handed over to the investigators. He continued to be Interior minister till 2012. Publicly, he argued that any Pakistani investigation would lack credibility, so the UN should do it instead. The UN report described as mystifying “the efforts of certain Pakistani government authorities to obstruct access to military and intelligence sources”.
Zardari refused to have an autopsy done on Benazir. Privately, he said that the murder was part of history, another chapter in the Bhutto family story: Benazir had played her sacrificial role and there was no point in looking back.
Zardari has said that the Taliban murdered his wife but that he was not sure who commissioned them. But why did he allow the investigation to be blocked? Why had he not pressed his interior minister to clear up the obvious inconsistencies in his account? What does he tell Benazir’s children? More important, what does he and Pakistan’s religious establishment tell their poor juvenile potential suicide bombers-cum-assassins?
Gautam Pingle
Former Dean of Research at Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad
Email: gautam.pingle@gmail.com