BHUTTO ASSASSIN LINKED TO AL QAEDA, claims Pakistani official - Bhutto died of fractured skull
28 December 2007
Mourners reach out to Bhutto funeral entourage
The Pakistani Interior Ministry said Friday the suicide bomber who killed Benazir Bhutto has been identified as belonging to a militant group with links to al Qaeda, Pakistan’s GEO TV reported.
An Italian news agency says al Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri began planning the Pakistan killing in October.
Al Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri
The ministry said the attacker was with Lashkar-e-Jhangvi — a Sunni Muslim militant group that the Pakistani government has blamed for hundreds of killings — according to the report.
There was no sign the group has claimed responsibility for the attack on the Pakistan opposition leader.
The U.S. State Department lists Lashkar-e-Jhangvi as a terrorist organization and said it had links to the Taliban. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf banned the group in 2001.
“In January 1999, the group attempted to assassinate former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif,” the State Department Web site says.
Benazir Bhutto died as a result of a fractured skull after hitting her head on part of her car’s sun roof, not as a result of a bullet or bomb shrapnel, a spokesman for Pakistan’s Interior Ministry said Friday.
Nothing entered the opposition leader’s head, said spokesman Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema.
At a news conference, Cheema showed images of Bhutto in a car, standing up through an open sunroof, looking out at the crowd as she was about to be driven away.
When the gunshots rang out and the explosion occurred, Bhutto “fell down or perhaps ducked” and apparently hit her head on a lever, Cheema said, adding that the lever was stained with blood.
Also Friday, a report by the state-run news agency Associated Press of Pakistan said al Qaeda had claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement.
The agency quoted Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema as saying, “Al Qaeda in a statement has accepted the responsibility of her assassination, as in the past she had been receiving life threats from this terrorist group.”
No one has accepted responsibility for Bhutto’s death on radical Islamist Web sites that regularly post such messages from al Qaeda and other militant groups.
On Thursday, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin citing an alleged claim of responsibility by the terror network for Bhutto’s death, a DHS official said.
But FBI and other law enforcement officials said that the claim is unsubstantiated and that federal officials are not making any comments about its validity.
Bhutto, 54, was killed Thursday in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, by flying shrapnel stemming from a suicide bombing, the Pakistani government said.
Italian news agency Adnkronos International apparently was the source of the al Qaeda claim, saying the terror network’s Afghan commander and spokesman Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid had telephoned the agency with it.
“We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahedeen,” the Italian news agency quoted Al-Yazid as saying.
The agency said that al Qaeda’s No. 2 official, Ayman al-Zawahiri, set the wheels in motion for Bhutto’s assassination in October.
One Islamist Web site repeated the assertion, but experts in the field don’t consider the site to be a reliable source for Islamist messages.
The DHS official said the claim was “an unconfirmed open source claim of responsibility” and the bulletin was sent out at about 6 p.m. Thursday to state and local law enforcement agencies.
The official characterized the bulletin as “information sharing.”
FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said the validity of such a claim is “undetermined.” Kolko said the FBI and the intelligence community is reviewing it “for any intelligence value.”
Ross Feinstein, spokesman for Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, said the U.S. intelligence community is monitoring the situation and trying to figure out who is responsible for the assassination.
“We are not in a position to confirm who may be responsible,” Feinstein said.
Bhutto had been critical of what she believed was a lack of effort by Musharraf’s government to protect her.
About a week after an October 18 car-bomb attack on her motorcade in Karachi, Pakistan, Bhutto sent an an e-mail to Mark Siegel, her U.S. spokesman, lobbyist and longtime friend.
In the e-mail, Bhutto said Musharraf should bear some of the blame if anything were to happen to her.
“I have been made to feel insecure by his minions and there is no way what is happening in terms of stopping me from taking private cars or using tinted windows or giving jammers or four police mobiles to cover all sides cld happen without him,” she said in the e-mail.
Musharraf, after an emergency meeting of his top officials Thursday, told his nation the attack was “the work of those very same people with whom we are waging a war. Pakistan’s biggest threat comes from these terrorists.”
“We will not sit in peace until we finish off these insurgents and terrorists, until we get rid of them from their very roots because in this is Pakistan’s success and health,” he said. “Otherwise, this is the biggest obstacle in our quest for peace.
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One Response to “BHUTTO ASSASSIN LINKED TO AL QAEDA, claims Pakistani official - Bhutto died of fractured skull”
January 7th, 2008 at 11:19 AM
[...] On Friday, the Pakistani Interior Ministry offered a slightly different version, saying the suicide bomber was associated with Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a terrorist group linked to al Qaeda. This initial belief that an act of terrorism was responsible for the tragedy that killed Mrs. Bhutto and 25 of her supporters caused a great deal of confusion. [...]