Assassins tried using live baby bomb: Benazir book

In her book Benazir tells what happened after she returned to Pakistan last October 18. Around 10 hours after landing in Karachi, the armoured truck in which she was travelling was attacked by two powerful bombs resulting in 179 dead and nearly 600 wounded.

“About 30 minutes before,” Benazir writes, “I saw a man holding up a baby. The baby was dressed in PPP colours and was about one or two years old. The man gesticulated repeatedly to me to take the baby, I gesticulated to the crowd to make way for him. But when the crowd parted, the man would not come forward.”

“The man then went to a policemobile to the left of the truck, which refused to take the baby. As the man tried to hand the baby to the second policemobile, the first policemobile made an announcement, ‘Don’t take the baby, don’t let the baby up on the truck.’

“Both these policemobiles were exactly parallel to where I was sitting in the armoured truck. We suspect the baby’s clothes were lined with plastic explosives. As the man scuffled with the police in the van to hand the baby over, the first explosion took place on the van. Everyone in that van was killed as were those around it. Human flesh, blood and body pieces flew everywhere.

“The blood and gore rose up to the truck, sticking to the clothes, hair and hands of the people I had been standing up with earlier.”

Commenting on the October suicide attack, Benazir’s co-author and Washington DC-based lobbyist Mark Siegel said that just as on the night of Benazir’s murder, there was no forensic evidence left to inspect because police “hosed down and washed everything” on the orders of the Interior Ministry. Siegel says it was the Bush administration that kept urging Benazir to go back to Pakistan because they “finally came to understand that Benazir was the only way to save Musharraf”.

Key conversations were held with US Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad, Under Secretary of State Nick Burns and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“There were at least two conversations with Secretary of State Rice that I’m aware of, there may have been another one,” Siegel recalled. “This was in September and October with Rice encouraging her to go back when the negotiations with Musharraf broke down.”

Siegel adds that before leaving Dubai for Karachi Benazir was briefed by the UAE government about plots to kill her. On the basis of the information provided, she wrote to President Pervez Musharraf naming four men allegedly involved in masterminding the plots.

“There were four names she mentions in her letter to Musharaf,” Siegel explained, “including the man who was in charge of the ISI covert operations in India, that’s where he got his credentials, and he was the man in charge of rigging the 2002 elections. Shah something.”

Asked if Islamic radicals were responsible for Benazir’s death, Siegel replied, “Well, when you talk about responsibility, there are those who pulled the trigger and there are those who planned and paid for it. Its quite likely that the Pakistani Taliban or elements of al-Qaeda were involved…But in terms of where this came from I think pro-government elements…were clearly involved.”

“I don’t know that we think Musharraf ordered it, I’m sure he didn’t. But you know it’s like Thomas A Beckett, ‘Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?’ So I think that whoever did it, thought Musharraf would not be displeased.”