Bhutto has been murdered

BBB
The male Muslim religious extremists will fight to the death to prevent a leader being elected who was born without a penis.

BBB

With security like that, even a caveman could do it.

bigdice wrote :



one might substitute : without TOO MUCH CORRUPTION .
not many (any ?) countries that are having an election without any corruption .
as the NAT GEO article mentioned : corruption is all over the place in pakistan - and the higher up one goes , the higher the corruption !

and i just remembered musharraf and karzai just met (again !) to promise co-operation in fighting terrorism ! i wonder if they put the show on just for the western nations to extract more money from them for themselves and their buddies , since the moneys coming from the western nations hardly ever sem to reach the destitute villagers !
hbg

Good for them. I was just observing on the strange difference in emphasis between the British and the continental news stations, in their first responses.

I'm sure the BBC also eventually got round to mentioning the Musharraf stuff, but the difference in emphasis was striking.

Re: BBB

Dont you think it's a little early to decide who was responsible?

I dont know much about Pakistan, other than what I read in the newspapers - and even then just haphazardly. My father knows much more - he lived in Pakistan for eight months or so, doing research about trade and production and working conditions. That was ten years ago or something though...

He's basically just agnostic about who did it, for now. Says there are just too many players that could credibly be guilty. Pakistani politics is a corrupt snakepit. Musharraf is an easy guess, and thats where first suspicions seem to be going, at least here. Islamist extremists could be guilty too. Could even be from within the arena of party politics, Bhutto's own PPP for example. Not particularly likely, it's just, anything's possible.

Musharraf didn't pull the trigger, but I think he bought the bullets. Probably with money the USA gives him to fight Terrorism.

I completely agree, GW. I would have thought it was obvious.

Wow. Anne on the Today Show is grilling Romney about Musharraf! I mean deep into the territory we're discussing...and he is waffling.

Didn't know Anne had it in her...<laughing>

Romney seemed not to know of the implications of Musharraf's possible culpability.

My initial guess is that BBB is correct. With the extremist Muslim tenets against women in power, there were probably legions who would choose martyrdom to kill that uppity woman.

Musharraf held her under house arrest (could easily be seen as protecting her the best he could -- while it also kept his political rival off the streets).

I'm amazed he's been able to keep HIMSELF alive.

When she rebels and goes out campaigning, it falls to him to adequately protect her...

I can imagine his predicament.

(and his attitude in arranging security)

I think this scenario may have been the culprit.

I'll put my money on Musharraf for now. Something about being killed by snipers smells like military to me, but I could be wrong.

Re: BBB


I don't think musharraf was behind Bhutto's murder. It's more likely that she was killed by religious extremist as I noted above.

After an announcement by Bhutto's Party,CNN is trying to confirm theit statement of the existence of an intelligence communication from al Qaeda leadership congratulating it's members for killing Bhutto.

BBB

even in the united states it has not always been possible to protect presidents against someone wanting to take a potshot at them .
unless she would have been put into a heavyly armoured vehicle , it would have ben next to impossible to fully protect her ... and she WANTED to be able campaign out in the open . it's too bad it happened , but that unfortunately is reality .

one reporter from the scene explained that if she would not have been killed by bullets , she probably would have ben blown up by a suicide bomber - there seem to be plenty of them in pakistan .

looking back just a few years , pakistan looked like a reasonably peaceful country - at least not many suicide bombers roaming around .

you might remember that indira gandhi was murdered by her own security guards .

so there might be no safe place at all !
hbg

BBB
Benazir Bhutto died from hitting her car's sunroof; no bullet or shrapnel found in her, Pakistan's Interior Ministry says. This would have resulted from the impact on the vehicle of the suicide bomber's explosion.

The government said al-Qaida and the Taliban were responsible for her death, claiming it intercepted an al-Qaida leader's message of congratulation for the assassination.

But many of Bhutto's furious supporters blamed President Pervez Musharraf's government for the shooting and bombing attack on the former prime minister, Musharraf's most powerful opponent. They rampaged through several cities in violence that left at least 23 dead less than two weeks before crucial elections.

"We have the evidence that al-Qaida and Taliban were behind the suicide attack on Benazir Bhutto," Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz said.

Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said that on Friday, the government recorded an "intelligence intercept" in which militant leader Baitullah Mehsud "congratulated his people for carrying out this cowardly act."

Cheema described Mehsud as an "al-Qaida leader" who was also behind the Karachi bomb blast in October against Bhutto that killed more than 140 people.

Bhutto was killed Thursday when a suicide attacker shot at her and then blew himself up as she left a rally in Rawalpindi. Authorities initially said she died from bullet wounds, and a surgeon who treated her said she died from the impact of shrapnel on her skull.

But Cheema said she was killed when she tried to duck back into the vehicle, and the shock waves from the blast knocked her head into a lever attached to the sunroof, fracturing her skull, he said.

You'll have to excuse me if I don't immediately take the government's word for it.

FreeDuck


I took that into consideration. I always look for the incentive. The religious extremists have more to gain than the government.

BBB

Main suspects are warlords and security forces
From The London Times
December 28, 2007
Main suspects are warlords and security forces
Jeremy Page, South Asia Correspondent

The main suspects in the assassination are the foreign and Pakistani Islamist militants who saw Ms Bhutto as a Westernised heretic and an American stooge, and had repeatedly threatened to kill her.

But fingers will also be pointed at the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, (ISI) which has had close ties to the Islamists since the 1970s and has been used by successive Pakistani leaders to suppress political opposition. Ms Bhutto narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in October, when a suicide bomber struck at a rally in Karachi to welcome her back from exile.

Earlier that month two Pakistani militant warlords based in the country's northwestern areas had threatened to kill her.

One was Baitullah Mehsud, a top militant commander fighting the Pakistani Army in South Waziristan, who has ties to al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taleban. The other was Haji Omar, the leader of the Pakistani Taleban, who is also from South Waziristan and fought with the Afghan Mujahidin against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Ms Bhutto said after the attack that she had received a letter, signed by someone claiming to be a friend of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, threatening to slaughter her like a goat. But she also accused Pakistani authorities of not providing her with sufficient security, and hinted that they may have been complicit in the Karachi attack.

She indicated that she had more to fear from unidentified members of a power structure that she described as allies of the "forces of militancy".

Analysts say that President Musharraf is unlikely to have ordered her assassination, but that elements of the Army and intelligence service stood to lose money and power if she became prime minister. The ISI includes some Islamists who became radicalised while running the American-funded campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan and were opposed to her on principle. Saudi Arabia is also thought to have frowned on Ms Bhutto as being too secular and Westernised and to have favoured Nawaz Sharif, another former Prime Minister.

The initial suicide bombing upon her arrival killed approx 140....but missed her.

This may explain the addition of bullets to try to ensure she died this time.

Re: BBB


I don't believe the atopsy doctor's report that Bhutto died from a bump on the head that fractured her skull. He said she was dead on arrival at the hospital. I doubt a head bump would have caused instant death. It appears the government is trying to make her death an accident rather than a murder.

BBB

Skull fractures:
http://www.ohsu.edu/health/health-topics/topic.cfm?id=8638

She bumped her head? Yeah, riiiiiight!