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Bhutto Report: Musharraf Planned to Fix Elections
By Saeed Shah
McClatchy Newspapers
Monday 31 December 2007
Naudero Pakistan - The day she was assassinated last Thursday,
Benazir Bhutto had planned to reveal new evidence alleging the
involvement of Pakistan's intelligence agencies in rigging the
country's upcoming elections, an aide said Monday.
Bhutto had been due to meet U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep.
Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to hand over a report charging that the
military Inter-Services Intelligence agency was planning to fix the
polls in the favor of President Pervez Musharraf.
Safraz Khan Lashari, a member of the Pakistan People's Party election
monitoring unit, said the report was "very sensitive" and that the
party wanted to initially share it with trusted American politicians
rather than the Bush administration, which is seen here as strongly
backing Musharraf.
"It was compiled from sources within the (intelligence) services who
were working directly with Benazir Bhutto," Lashari said, speaking
Monday at Bhutto's house in her ancestral village of Naudero, where
her husband and children continued to mourn her death.
The ISI had no official comment. However, an agency official,
speaking only on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized
to speak on the subject, dismissed the allegations as "a lot of talk
but not much substance."
Musharraf has been highly critical of those who allege that his
regime is involved in electoral manipulation. "Now when they lose,
they'll have a good rationale: that it is all rigged, it is all
fraud," he said in November. "In Pakistan, the loser always cries."
According to Lashari, the document includes information on a "safe
house" allegedly being run by the ISI in a central neighborhood of
Islamabad, the alleged headquarters of the rigging operation.
It names as the head of the unit a brigadier general recently retired
from the ISI, who was secretly assigned to run the rigging operation,
Lashari said. It charges that he was working in tandem with the head
of a civilian intelligence agency. Before her return to Pakistan,
Bhutto, in a letter to Musharraf, had named the intelligence official
as one of the men she accused of plotting to kill her.
Lashari said the report claimed that U.S. aid money was being used to
fix the elections. Ballots stamped in favor of the Pakistan Muslim
League-Q, which supports Musharraf, were to be produced by the
intelligence agencies in about 100 parliamentary constituencies.
"They diverted money from aid activities. We had evidence of where
they were spending the money," Lashari said.
Lashari, who formerly taught environmental economics at Britain's
Cranfield University, said the effort was directed at constituencies
where the result was likely to be decided by a small margin, so it
wouldn't be obvious.
Bhutto was due to meet Specter and Kennedy after dinner last
Thursday. She was shot as she left an election rally in Rawalpindi
early that evening. Pakistan's government claims instead that she was
thrown against the lever of her car's sunroof, fracturing her skull.
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Shah is a McClatchy special correspondent.
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