IHT : Bhutto says she warned of plotting days before attack

Friday, October 19, 2007

Bhutto says she warned of plotting days before attack

By Carlotta Gall and Salman Masood | October 19, 2007

KARACHI, Pakistan: The Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, who narrowly survived a bloody suicide attack Thursday night, said Friday she had sent a letter to President Pervez Musharraf days ago listing names and other specific information about people in the Pakistani government and security forces who were plotting against her.

She did not expressly blame the government or give the names in a news conference Friday, less than 24 hours after the attack, in which two explosions killed 134 people and wounded 450. Friday, she and the authorities in Karachi blamed Islamist militants for carrying out the bombing.

But she said it was suspicious that streetlights failed after sunset Thursday when her convoy was moving through the streets of Karachi, The AP reported. "We were scanning the crowd with the floodlights, but it was difficult to scan the crowds because there was so much darkness," she said, according to The AP

The explosions took place just feet from a truck in which Bhutto was traveling during a triumphal procession marking her return to Pakistan after eight years in exile.

The AP said Bhutto had written to Musharraf on Oct. 16. In an interview Friday published on the Web site of Paris-Match, Bhutto said, "I know exactly who is trying to kill me," blaming officials who had belonged to the regime of the former president, General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, who seized power in 1977 when he arrested and hanged Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Bhutto's father. She said those officials were behind the extremism and fanaticism troubling the country and had to be purged from the secret services. Taliban and Islamist extremists "cannot act on their own," she said in the interview. "They need logistics, food, weapons and someone to supervise them."

Bhutto had retreated inside the armored truck a few minutes before the attack and was unhurt, but scores of people were killed among the huge crowds of perhaps 200,000 or more. It was a bloody end to the triumphal tenor of her homecoming. She was returning to Pakistan to lead her party in the parliamentary elections scheduled for January.

Accounts of the attack differed somewhat: local security officials blamed a lone suicide bomber, but Bhutto was quoted by The Associated Press as saying that there were several attackers.

At a news conference in Karachi Friday, the home secretary of Sindh Province, Ghulam Mohatarem, said a single suicide bomber first threw a grenade to disrupt the security cordon around Bhutto's procession before lunging at the truck and detonating the explosives he was wearing.

But Bhutto said at a later news conference that there had been two attackers, and that her security guards had also found a third man armed with a pistol and a fourth with an undetonated suicide vest, according to The AP

She said her guards had prevented more deaths. "They stood their ground, and they stood all around the truck, and they refused to let the suicide bomber — the second suicide bomber — get near the truck," she said, The AP reported.

"We believe democracy alone can save Pakistan from disintegration and a militant takeover," she added. "We are prepared to risk our lives and we are prepared to risk our liberty, but we are not prepared to surrender our great nation to the militants."

Mohatarem said that a police vehicle in the attacker's path had taken the brunt of the explosion. Pellets and ball bearings had been packed with the explosives, he said, and accounted for the high number of casualties in the dense crowd. He could not confirm that a head found at the scene was that of the attacker, but he said he believed the attacker belonged to one of the extremist Islamist groups active in Pakistan.

"We do not know which group but one of the extremist groups," he said.

There were no claims of responsibility. The Associated Press had quoted Mohatarem earlier as saying that the attack bore the hallmarks of a pro-Taliban Pakistani militant commander, Baitullah Mehsud, who has been linked to Al Qaeda and is active near the Afghan border. He had threatened to send suicide bombers to attack Bhutto because of her strong support for the fight against terrorism.

However, Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, said he blamed some in Pakistan's intelligence agencies who felt threatened by Bhutto.

Bhutto, who had spent eight hours on the open roof of the truck waving to supporters, had climbed inside 10 minutes before the blasts occurred just before midnight, said Rehman Malik, her security adviser and close associate.

She was immediately taken to Bilawal House, her home in Karachi. The parade through the city had been scheduled to end several miles away at the tomb of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

Bhutto's arrival at 2 p.m. had drawn huge crowds, who danced on top of buses and surged forward as she inched her way for hours through her home city.

The strong outpouring provided an emotional homecoming for Bhutto and political vindication of sorts for a woman twice turned out of office as prime minister, after being accused of corruption and mismanagement.

It also demonstrated that she remained a potent political force in Pakistan, even after her long absence, and marked what supporters and opponents alike agreed was a new political chapter for the nation.

The violence that quickly followed showed it to be a treacherous one as well.

The explosions, caught on camera, gave off brilliant white flashes and set two cars ablaze. Survivors stumbled over bodies and debris in a haze of smoke.

"I can only say that I saw heaps of bodies lying over there," said her adviser, Malik. He was standing at the front of the truck and was knocked down by the force of the blast, he said. His hair was burned.

"The damage could have been much worse had we not taken our own security arrangements," he added.

The government had promised before Bhutto's arrival to provide security. It had also asked her to delay returning. But Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party had fielded 2,000 of its own workers to form rings around their returning leader, guarding her with their numbers and preventing any vehicles or people from approaching.

Before the explosions sundered the celebration, thousands of supporters and workers from her party had lined Bhutto's route, waving banners and surging forward for a glimpse of the opposition leader. Many danced in the road.

Bhutto waved as music pumped out from loudspeakers. The crowd was overwhelmingly working class. Many young men said they were unemployed, but had traveled hundreds of miles, paying their own way, and camping out overnight on the road to the airport to await her arrival.

In the crowd, Raja Munir Ahmed, 42, a real estate agent, said he had come from Mirpur in the Pakistani-administered part of Kashmir. "It was a journey of 1,500 kilometers, and all along we saw buses and cars carrying Peoples Party flags," he said. "People want change. People want to get rid of inflation and unemployment."

Then he shouted, "Long live Bhutto!" and disappeared into the crowd.

Such supporters were among the majority of those killed and wounded. But about six were also police and law enforcement officials, and a further 20 police officials were wounded, Mohatarem said. Eight police vans were flanking the truck at the time and the explosions occurred on the left and right sides of the road, Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao said.

He denied that it was a security lapse, saying that the crowds and length of the route made it difficult to ensure security.