One Murder Closer To A Nuclear Nightmare In Pakistan
December 30, 2007
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She had been warned by her security detail not to put herself at risk by exposing herself in the middle of seething crowds. But Benazir Bhutto, fatalist and populist to the last, could not resist.
Moments earlier she had addressed an adulatory mass, convincing them and herself that her party could win next month’s parliamentary elections and allow her to taste power once again in her beloved homeland.
On the way out of Liaqat Bagh Park in the centre of Rawalpindi – the garrison town that neighbours the capital, Islamabad – she felt relatively safe. Security had been tight and the chance to grandstand on the home turf of incumbent President Pervez Musharraf was too good to miss.
As her white bulletproof Land Cruiser left the park, her driver was forced to slow down to negotiate a path through the crowds. Bhutto stood up and out of the sun roof, smiling and waving from under her traditional white headscarf.
Grainy video footage shows that as the car passed, a gunman just a few feet behind raised his weapon and fired three times in Bhutto’s direction. Then the area around the car erupted in a fireball as a suicide bomber flung himself at the vehicle.
What happened next is, extraordinarily, a matter of debate. Some witnesses, backed by doctors who treated the opposition leader, say she was hit in the neck and shoulder by two bullets, one of which severely damaged her spinal cord. Then she was hit by shrapnel from the bomb, which added to her already terrible injuries. She fell down through the hatch, fatally injured and slumped on the car’s back seat in a pool of blood.
Bizarrely, the Pakistan government asserted that her death was more like a grisly accident than an assassination – that the former prime minister died when the blast from the bomb threw her sideways and she smashed her head on the metal lever that opened the sun roof. The blow shattered her skull, they said, an injury from which she subsequently died. The claim came conveniently after Bhutto’s body was buried on Friday, just a day after her death, in accordance with Muslim custom.
However she died, the darkest fears of her supporters, who had welcomed the 54-year-old head of the Bhutto political clan home from exile just two months ago, had become a reality. Their political hope was now a blood-soaked corpse.
The political ripples triggered by her death did not take long to form. As news of her assassination spread, riots broke out across the country of 160 million people, as supporters took to the streets to vent their grief and blame Musharraf’s government for not giving their leader enough protection. As severe doubts arose over whether planned elections for January 8 could now go ahead, Bhutto’s funeral took place at her family mausoleum near the southern city of Karachi, attended by her husband and three children and hundreds of thousands of mourners.
The violence was spreading. Airlines were grounded, major roads blocked and petrol stations were closed as the government tried to restrict movement. In the southern province of Sindh, the base of Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), police were ordered to shoot rioters on sight.
Although more than 30 deaths were reported throughout the country, Pakistan security forces yesterday appeared to be containing the outbreaks. But beyond Pakistan’s volatile borders the international repercussions of Bhutto’s death were still being felt.
Pakistan, which neighbours the Taliban and al-Qaeda hotbed of Afghanistan, has been in the frontline of the war against global terror since the 9/11 attacks, an important beacon of stability in a troubled, largely Islamic region.
The violent death of Bhutto – who, it was hoped, would share power with Musharraf in a national unity government after the election – has the capability of plunging Pakistan’s openly warring political factions into a brutal civil war.
With Musharraf’s grip on power and security weakening, there is a twin concern for the future: that the country’s potential as a breeding ground for terrorism could increase exponentially, and that Pakistan’s arsenal of nuclear weapons could fall into the wrong hands.
M J Gohel, the head of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London-based security and intelligence think-tank, believes there is a strong possibility that parts of Pakistan’s nuclear technology could fall into the grip of militants.
“It’s a very, very valid risk,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before al-Qaeda or somebody sympathetic to them gets hold of nuclear weapons, and if al-Qaeda or its sympathisers are to get hold of them, then Pakistan is at this point the weakest link in the chain.”
Nuclear materials controlled by Islamic fanatics is the White House’s worst nightmare but Bhutto’s death brings the possibility closer.
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