um....wow.
an early assessment/speculation as to who did this:
Quote:
Suspects in the Bhutto assassination
In the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, Mark Tran looks at the background to the crisis in Pakistan
Thursday December 27, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Who are the suspects?
Even before Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October after eight years of self-imposed exile, there had been open threats against her. A pro-Taliban militant leader, Baitullah Masood, said he would target her with suicide attacks. Masood, probably the most prominent militant leader in the north-western region bordering Afghanistan, has also been accused of carrying out attacks on Pakistani soldiers.
Bhutto's pro-western attitude would have made her a natural target for militant Islamists. Another militant commander, Haji Omar, said before her return: "She has an agreement with America. We will carry out attacks on Benazir Bhutto as we did on General Pervez Musharraf [the Pakistani president]." Authorities had warned Bhutto that extremists sympathetic to the Taliban and al-Qaida would target her.
Who else is in the frame?
After the October assassination attempt, Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who is in Dubai where the couple had been living in exile, accused members of the Pakistani security services, the ISI. "I blame government for these blasts," he said. "It is the work of the intelligence agencies."
Elements of the ISI sympathise with the Taliban and it was a possibility that "rogue elements" in the intelligence services were involved in the two attacks. The ISI became one of Pakistan's most powerful institutions under General Zia-ul-Haq, the man who launched an Islamisation campaign and who overthrew Bhutto's father and had him hung. After Gen Zia's death in a mysterious plane crash in 1988, the ISI actively campaigned against Bhutto when she entered politics.
Has there been other violence?
Hours before Bhutto's death, four people were killed and three wounded in a clash just outside Islamabad between pro-government supporters and backers of the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Last week, more than 50 people were killed when a suicide attacker detonated a bomb at a crowded mosque near the home of Pakistan's former interior minister on one of Islam's major holidays. Aftab Khan Sherpao, once a supporter of Bhutto, took a strong anti-militant line in office.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/S...232496,00.html
there's a significant gap separating the simplified political landscape in international reporting and what seems to have been unfolding on the ground in pakistan, so it's taking a while to get any sense of what this means, really.
except that it can't be good.