Also see:     
AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications    [

Also see below:     
Bhutto's Husband, Son to Head Party    [

    New Questions Arise in Killing of Ex-Premier
    By Jane Perlez
    The New York Times

    Monday 31 December 2007

    Lahore, Pakistan - New details of Benazir Bhutto's final moments, including indications that her doctors felt pressured to conform to government accounts of her death, fueled the arguments over her assassination on Sunday and added to the pressure on Pakistan's leaders to accept an international inquiry.

    Athar Minallah, a board member of the hospital where Ms. Bhutto was treated, released her medical report along with an open letter showing that her doctors wanted to distance themselves from the government theory that Ms. Bhutto had died by hitting her head on a lever of her car's sunroof during the attack.

    In his letter, Mr. Minallah, who is also a prominent lawyer, said the doctors believed that an autopsy was needed to provide the answers to how she actually died. Their request for one last Thursday was denied by the local police chief.

    Pakistani and Western security experts said the government's insistence that Ms. Bhutto, a former prime minister, was not killed by a bullet was intended to deflect attention from the lack of government security around her. On Sunday, Pakistani newspapers covered their front pages with photographs showing a man apparently pointing a gun at her from just yards away.

    Her vehicle came under attack by a gunman and suicide bomber as she left a political rally in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani Army keeps its headquarters, and where the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency has a strong presence.

    The government's explanation, that Ms. Bhutto died after hitting her head as she ducked from the gunfire or was tossed by the force of the suicide blast, has been greeted with disbelief by her supporters, ordinary Pakistanis and medical experts. While some of the mystery could be cleared up by exhuming the body, it is not clear whether Ms. Bhutto's family would give permission, such is their distrust of the government.

    Mr. Minallah distributed the medical report with his open letter to the Pakistani news media and The New York Times. He said the doctor who wrote the report, Mohammad Mussadiq Khan, the principal professor of surgery at the Rawalpindi General Hospital, told him on the night of Ms. Bhutto's death that she had died of a bullet wound.

    Dr. Khan declined through Mr. Minallah to speak with a reporter on the grounds that he was an employee of a government hospital and was fearful of government reprisals if he did not support its version of events.

    The medical report, prepared with six other doctors, does not specifically mention a bullet because the actual cause of the head wound was to be left to an autopsy, Mr. Minallah said. The doctors had stressed to him that "without an autopsy it is not at all possible to determine as to what had caused the injury," he wrote.

    But the chief of police in Rawalpindi, Saud Aziz, "did not agree" to the autopsy request by the doctors, Mr. Minallah said in his letter.

    A former senior Pakistani police official, Wajahat Latif, who headed the Federal Investigative Agency in the early 1990s, said that in "any case of a suspected murder an autopsy is mandatory." To waive an autopsy, Mr. Latif said, relatives were required to apply for permission.

    At a news conference Sunday, Ms. Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, said he had declined a request for a post-mortem examination. "It was an insult to my wife, an insult to the sister of the nation, an insult to the mother of the nation," he said. "I know their forensic reports are useless. I refuse to give them her last remains."

    The question of an autopsy has become central to the circumstances of Ms. Bhutto's death because of conflicting versions put forward by the Pakistani government, which have stirred an already deep well of distrust of the government among Ms. Bhutto's supporters and other Pakistanis.

    On the night Ms. Bhutto was assassinated, an unidentified Interior Ministry spokesman was quoted by the official Pakistani news agency as saying that she had died of a "bullet wound in the neck by a suicide bomber."

    The next day, Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, the Interior Ministry spokesman, recast that version of events, saying at a news conference that Ms. Bhutto died of a wound sustained when she hit her head on a lever attached to the sun roof of the vehicle as she ducked a bullet and was thrown about by the force of the blast. "Three shots were fired but they missed her," Brigadier Cheema said. "Then there was an explosion."

    The new images of the men who appear to have been Ms. Bhutto's assassins showed one dressed in a sleeveless black waistcoat and rimless sunglasses, and holding aloft what appeared to be a gun. He had a short haircut and wore the kind of attire reminiscent of plainclothes intelligence officials, though Al Qaeda and other militants have also been known to dress attackers in Western-style clothing in order to disguise them.

    That man is seen standing in front of another whose head is covered in a shawl in the style of Pashtun men from the Pakistan's tribal areas, where Al Qaeda has regrouped in the past year. He is described in the newspaper Dawn as the suicide bomber.

    Mr. Minallah, the hospital board member, said Ms. Bhutto's doctors raised the likelihood of a bullet killing her in their report, when they wrote, "Two to three tiny radio-densities underneath fracture segment are observed on both projections."

    The report said the doctors tried for 41 minutes to revive her. It said "the patient was pulseless and was not breathing," when she arrived at the hospital. "A wound was present on the right temporoparietal region, through which blood was trickling down and whitish material which looked like brain matter was visible in the wound," it said.

    Ms. Bhutto's colleagues who were in the vehicle with her said the interior was covered in blood, and the doctors wrote that "her clothes were soaked with blood."

    An account of her death that did not involve a gunshot wound was the optimal explanation for the government, said Bruce Riedel, an expert on Pakistan at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and a former member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. "If there is a gunshot wound, the security was abysmal," Mr. Riedel said. The government did not want to be exposed on its careless approach to security, he said.

    On Sunday, Ms. Bhutto's husband, Mr. Zardari, said he received a call from the Punjab home secretary on Thursday evening with a request for his permission for a post-mortem examination. He said he refused because he did not trust the government investigation to prove the cause of her death.

    In ordinary circumstances, an autopsy runs counter to Islamic belief that a body should not be tampered with and should be buried as quickly as possible. But several Pakistanis said that in certain classes of Muslim society, particularly the better educated and more urban people, autopsies were not ruled out on religious grounds.

    There were also provisions under Pakistani law for the exhumation of a body and a delayed post-mortem, Mr. Latif, the former senior Pakistani police official, said. In those cases, the state or a family can ask a magistrate for exhumation. The magistrate then forms a board of doctors to carry out the procedures, he said.

    An international inquiry on Ms. Bhutto's death could not be carried out without an exhumation, a difficult decision in a Muslim country, Mr. Latif said.

    In response to a question at a heated news conference Saturday, Brigadier Cheema, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said the government was ready to exhume the body if the family asked.

    But Ms. Bhutto's supporters noted that the family and the party were so furious at President Musharraf, whom many of them blame for her death, that it was unlikely the Bhuttos would trust an exhumation that involved the government.

    Pressure came from a number of quarters for an inquiry modeled after one carried out by the United Nations after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister, in 2005.

    Though the Lebanon inquiry has moved very slowly, American and British officials, as well as an increasing number of Pakistanis, said that an investigation under the United Nations or some other international effort would restore confidence in the Pakistani government.

    On Sunday a conference of Ms. Bhutto's party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, called for an inquiry led by the United Nations.

    The Speaker of the House of Representatives in the United States Congress, Nancy Pelosi, said Saturday that the Bush administration should condition its future aid to Pakistan on its willingness to undertake an independent international inquiry.

    David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said Britain was ready to offer whatever help was needed.

    Brigadier Cheema made clear, however, that an international inquiry was not in the cards. "At this point in time we are quite confident with the kind of progress that is going on with our inquiries," he said Sunday.

    Foreign experts did not have the expertise, he said, to deal with the peculiarities of tribal areas that are the base of the nation's terrorist activities. "This is not just an ordinary criminal case where you only need forensic expert," he said. "We understand the dynamics better."

    --------

    Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from Karachi, Pakistan.

    Go to Original

    Party Elevates Bhutto's Son to Top Post
    By Laura King
    The Los Angeles Times

    Monday 31 December 2007

    Islamabad, Pakistan - Acting in accordance with her last wishes, Benazir Bhutto's party Sunday named her 19-year-old son as its ceremonial leader and her widowed husband as the executor of its day-to-day affairs as violence that had flared in Pakistan after her assassination subsided.

    The decision to bypass experienced senior politicians in the party hierarchy showed the slain opposition leader's steely determination to posthumously ensure the continuation of one of the country's most enduring political dynasties, even though her son is too young to contest office and her husband is shadowed by corruption allegations.

    The move, three days after his mother's assassination, thrust into the spotlight Bilawal Zardari, a young man whom Bhutto had kept out of the public eye as much as possible during an upbringing that came almost exclusively outside Pakistan.

    Dark-haired, slender and composed, the Oxford history student bears a striking resemblance, both in looks and demeanor, to his assassinated mother.

    Underscoring the weight of legacy, Bhutto's son, who has two younger sisters, was introduced at a news conference in his ancestral home village of Naudero as Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the first public use of his maternal surname.

    "The party's long struggle for democracy will continue with renewed vigor," he said, speaking in even-toned, lightly British-accented English. "My mother always said democracy is the best revenge."

    Although there is generally warm sentiment toward Bilawal Zardari, his father is a far more polarizing figure. In the eyes of many of Bhutto's admirers, Asif Ali Zardari, whom she wed in an arranged marriage, has tarnished her legacy.

    A Cabinet minister in Bhutto's two administrations as prime minister, Zardari subsequently spent eight years in prison on corruption charges. Although he has denied all allegations, so widespread was his reputation for taking kickbacks that he was known as "Mr. 10 Percent."

    In passing the political torch to Bhutto's son and husband, her Pakistan People's Party pointedly refrained from seeking any delay in the parliamentary election scheduled to take place Jan. 8. The country's Election Commission, controlled by supporters of President Pervez Musharraf, is to announce a decision Monday about the timing of the vote.

    Analysts said moving ahead swiftly with the polling would allow Bhutto's party to capitalize on what could be a large sympathy vote in addition to the party's already formidable voter base. That, they said, could more than make up for whatever organizational disadvantages the party would suffer due to disarray in the wake of its leader's sudden death.

    Because neither the father or son can run for office, the party's candidate for prime minister, in the event of victory, would likely be Bhutto's deputy, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, who stood in for her during her years of exile.

    With Bhutto's party saying it would contest the elections, the party of opposition leader Nawaz Sharif said it would almost certainly field candidates as well. Sharif, another former prime minister, had said after Bhutto was killed Thursday that his party would boycott the poll, but he had previously reversed threats to sit out the contest when Bhutto's party refused to join in a boycott call.

    Zardari, Bhutto's husband, said the party was determined to participate in the elections "despite this dangerous situation" because that was his late wife's wish. Emotional supporters invoked her name again and again, chanting, "Benazir, princess of heaven."

    Senior aides to Musharraf have indicated that the Election Commission would likely accede to the wishes of Bhutto's party in regard to the election date. It would be politically difficult for the government to force a delay if the other parties are prepared to go ahead, and if a lull in violence holds.

    Sunday was the last of three days of government-decreed mourning for Bhutto, with schools and offices due to reopen Monday. The country was rocked by riots and looting almost from the moment her death was announced, with most of the violence concentrated in her hometown, Karachi, Pakistan's largest city.

    The violence eased Sunday, but the death toll stood at nearly 50 and Karachi's streets were pockmarked with burned-out buildings and littered with the charred hunks of torched vehicles. Property damage ran into the many millions of dollars.

    The Bush administration refrained from taking any position on the timing of the vote or the accession of Bhutto's son and husband, saying only that it hoped the polling would be free and fair.

    The United States had hoped that Bhutto, armed with a strong election mandate, might have been able to forge a power-sharing accord with Musharraf, who has just embarked on a second five-year term as president, taking office after a vote by lawmakers that was sharply contested by his political opponents.

    That opposition, manifested in a series of unfavorable Supreme Court decisions, was widely believed to have been the main reason Musharraf imposed emergency rule, akin to martial law, for six weeks ending earlier this month. The Pakistani leader has given up his post as head of the army, but governing in concert with Bhutto would have helped cement a transition to civilian rule.

    Husain Haqqani, the director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University, said Pakistan's dynastic traditions likely drove the decision to anoint father and son.

    "Politics always has a sentimental dimension all over the world," he said. "It is the reason the Kennedys and the Nehru-Gandhis get elected."

    At Sunday's news conference in Naudero, in Pakistan's southern Sindh province, the elder Zardari demanded a U.N. probe into the assassination. Her party has sharply contested the government's version of events surrounding the attack against her, particularly the contention that she was not killed by an assassin's bullets, but by a skull fracture sustained when she struck her head on the sunroof she was standing up in as the suicide bomber struck.

    Bhutto aides who viewed and washed the body said gunshot entry and exit wounds were clearly visible, and opposition lawyer Anthar Minhallah, a member of the board of the hospital where she died, asserted that doctors were pressured into silence.

    The Dawn television station late Saturday aired previously unseen amateur photos of the assassination scene, showing a clean-shaven young man in sunglasses aiming a gun at Bhutto's back. Just behind him is a man wrapped in a white shawl, believed to have been the suicide bomber.

    --------

    Times staff writer James Gerstenzang in Crawford, Texas, contributed to this report.