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Journalism of Courage
On August 17, 1988, General Zia ul-Haq, who was president and army chief of Pakistan at the time, was killed in a mysterious air crash. His Lockheed C-130 Hercules, which was carrying 29 other passengers, including most of the Pakistani Army high command and then US Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphel, crashed soon after it took off from Bahawalpur, Punjab.
Even after 36 years of Zia’s death, there is no clarity on what led to the crash of the C-130. Was it a result of a technical issue or a sabotage? If it was sabotage, then who was behind it?
A revenge killing?
One of the prime suspects in carrying out Zia’s alleged killing was Murtaza Bhutto, son of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In 1977, Zia seized power after ousting Zulfikar in a military coup. Subsequently, Zia had Zulfikar tried and hanged for political murder in a controversial trial.
Following his father’s hanging, Murtaza formed an anti-Zia guerrilla group, whose aim “was to destroy the Zia regime, and the means it used included sabotage, hijackings and assassination in Pakistan,” according to the investigative report, published by Vanity Fair in 1989, by American journalist Edward Jay Epstein.
The group had initially taken responsibility for destroying Zia’s C-130 but later retracted the claim after it was announced that US Ambassador Raphel was aboard the plane. However, Murtaza admitted that he had tried to kill Zia on five previous occasions.
Was it an inside job?
Over the years, Zia’s son, Ijazul Haq, has maintained that Zia’s then vice-chief General Aslam Beg was part of the conspiracy to kill his father. In a 2012 interview, Ijazul said, “General Beg caused the wreckage of the plane to be removed to hide the effects of a missile fired into the plane from another plane. He also prevented autopsies of the dead to hide the fact that everyone on the plane had died from gas poisoning. A report by an air force officer, Zaheer Zaidi, was suppressed because it focused on the ‘other plane’,” according to a report by The Express Tribune.
Gen Beg came under suspicion soon after the crash as he did not board Zia’s C-130 on the fateful day and was scheduled to fly back in another, smaller plane. Also, it was believed that Zia was planning to replace Gen Beg with Lt Gen Mohammed Afzaal.
However, after Zia’s death, Gen Beg did not make any attempt to take over the government or thwart the national elections that were scheduled to take place in November 1988. When Benazir Bhutto won the elections, the army did not intervene.
Were the Soviets behind the alleged assassination?
Another suspect was the Soviet Union. Zia was an ally of the United States against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He played a crucial role in arming and training the Afghan mujahideen to fight the Soviet occupation.
According to Epstein’s report, the General had offended the Russians so much that they had publicly said Zia’s “obstructionist policy cannot be tolerated” — the statement came just a week before the crash of the C-130.
However, officials in the Pentagon rejected the theory that the Soviets did it. They told Epstein that the Soviet leadership would not have allowed such a move, primarily due to the presence of the US ambassador on the plane. However, the officials later acknowledged that the ambassador and his colleagues were not supposed to fly on the C-130 — Raphel had made a last-minute decision to board the plane. Therefore, it was possible that the perpetrators did not know that the Americans were on the C-130.
This hypothesis was rejected by General Mahmud Ali Durrani, who had been Zia’s military secretary from 1983 to 1986, in a 2005 interview with Barbara Crossette, The New York Times’ South Asia bureau chief from 1988 to 1991.
Gen Durrani said, “The guest list for the flight on the presidential plane had been fixed by August 13, and the Americans were on it,” Crossette wrote in her report.
What about the US?
A conspiracy theory held the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) responsible for Zia’s death. Some suspected that the General had embarrassed the US on several fronts. For instance, Zia had continued to supply arms to Gulbadin Hekmatyar, who was once also the CIA’s most favoured mujahideen commander, but later seemed to have spun out of American control and began to harbour anti-American sentiments, according to a report by Dawn.
Zia had also assisted militants who had begun to infiltrate Kashmir from Pakistan. The US saw this as the General’s bid to open up “a new theatre of jihad”, the report by Dawn said.
Americans were also worried about the progress Zia was making in building a nuclear bomb.
This theory was further fuelled by how the US handled the crash investigation. Pakistan conducted the probe in collaboration with the Americans — the US Defense Department and aircraft experts were part of the investigating team.
However, “within two months of the crash, the American government was alone in promoting the idea, without concrete material evidence, that a mechanical malfunction had brought down the plane. Most Pakistanis didn’t see it that way. From the start, they assumed assassination,” Crossette wrote in her report.
Why was Israel under suspicion?
Former US Ambassador to India John Gunther Dean suspected Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, of playing a role in getting Zia killed. In an interview with Crossette, he claimed that Mossad downed the plane in an effort to stop Pakistan from developing a nuclear bomb.
“Dean does not say that he believes Israel was totally to blame for the crash of the Pakistani C-130. Rather, he says that there could have also been other familiar hands sharing in the plot: India (whose relations with Israel have improved dramatically since then), the Afghans, perhaps some Pakistanis, or the KGB,” Crossette wrote.
However, when Dean — at the time, he was in India as ambassador — told his suspicions to Washington, he was accused of being mentally unbalanced and subsequently forced into retirement.
