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Regime knew it all: Benazir

LONDON: Benazir Bhutto, the assassinated former Pakistan Prime Minister, wrote in her autobiography, to be published posthumously next week, that the Musharraf regime was aware of the “specific threats,” including the names of those who planned to kill her, and yet it did not take any action.

Benazir says that she was told both by the Musharraf government and a “sympathetic Muslim foreign government” the names and “cellphone numbers of designated assassins.”

Besides the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud who — according to the Pakistan government was behind her assassination — she names Osama bin Laden’s teenaged son Hamza bin Laden and two others: the Red mosque militants and a Karachi-based group . In the extracts published by The Sunday Times, Benazir writes: “Musharraf’s regime knew of the specific threats against me including the names and numbers of those who planned to kill me, and the names of others — including those in his inner circle and in his party — whom we believed were conspiring. Despite our request, we received no reports on what actions were taken before my arrival [in Pakistan last October after her eight-year exile] as a follow-up to these warnings.”

Benazir also says that she wrote to Pervez Musharraf telling him that if she was assassinated by militants it would be due to their “sympathisers in his regime whom I suspected wanted to eliminate me and remove the threat I posed to their grip on power.”

The publication of “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy & the West,” which she was still writing when she was assassinated last December, is keenly awaited in the light of her allegations after the Karachi blast in October which she narrowly escaped that the Pakistani intelligence agencies were behind it.

The Pakistan People’s Party, and Benazir’s husband Asif Ali Zardari have alleged the government’s involvement in her murder and are campaigning for an independent international probe under the U.N. supervision.

Benazir writes that when she returned to Pakistan, despite attempts by Gen. (retd) Musharraf to stop her, she was aware of the dangers.

“I knew that the same elements of Pakistani society that had colluded to destroy my father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and end democracy in Pakistan in 1977 were now arrayed against me for the same purpose exactly 30 years later,” she writes.

Pointing the finger at Musharraf’s inner circle, she says that many of those who had been involved in the “judicial murder” of her father were “now entrenched in power in the Musharraf regime and the intelligence apparatus.” “There could have been no more dramatic statement to me than Gen [retd] Musharraf’s recent appointment as attorney-general of the son of the man who had sent my father to the gallows,” Benazir says.

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