Who fired those other bullets? Some unanswered questions from Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

[reorg]

Who fired those other bullets?
Nirupama Subramanian (The Hindu)

Some unanswered questions from Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

At least five activists of the Pakistan People’s Party who were killed during the December 27, 2007 attack on Benazir Bhutto died of gunshot wounds, pointing to the presence of more than one gunman at the site of her assassination, and contrary to the government’s claim that only three shots were fired, the party says.

The PPP says that loose ends such as the suspected presence of multiple gunmen, the build-up of a crowd near the exit gate of Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh where she was killed, an abrupt change in the route of her departure, and the infamous hosing down of the site within hours of the attack, are pointers to a wider conspiracy.

(...)

President Pervez Musharraf invited Scotland Yard to assist in the investigation, hoping this would placate the PPP and the international clamour for a transparent enquiry. But the party said that while it would cooperate with the British detectives, their terms of reference — to ascertain the precise cause of death — were such as to make their assistance meaningless. In interviews with The Hindu, some party workers said there were several unanswered questions to which the police had paid no attention as yet. Chief among them is the cause of death of the others who died. It has been assumed that all the 22 who died on the spot were killed in the suicide blast that followed the gun shots. But the PPP says it is not that open-and-shut.

(...)

Mr. Farahtullah Babar said it was to clear the fog of confusion that the party was asking for a wider investigation by a neutral international commission. “It is very intriguing where the bullets were coming from. It looks like the person we saw in the video footage and the suicide bomber may have been decoys, even though they caused a lot of damage. There could have been more than one sniper, may be two, three or even four,” he said. “There was cross-fire. This is one aspect that needs to be investigated.”

No post-mortems were done on any of the bodies. Several other aspects of the case are bothering the PPP. Mr. Rizvi said he was present at a meeting called by the Rawalpindi District Co-ordination Officer to discuss security and traffic arrangements for the meeting, where the route Benazir’s convoy would take after the meeting, exiting from Liaquat Bagh and out of Rawalpindi, was finalised. Several senior police officials were present at this meeting.

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read more at The Hindu, Opinion, Tuesday, Feb 05, 2008

[murielm99]

1. Maybe they will have to come up with their own

magic bullet theory, like the Warren Commission and Specter.

Sickening and tragic.