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Elphaba · 12-31-2007, 08:42 PM

I don't place any confidence in the following article because the US mainstream media is not my preferred choice of information. And, the US media is something to observe and contemplate. The exact cause of death continues to be an issue.

NYTimes ***

Quote:

New Questions Arise in Killing of Ex-Premier
By Jane Perlez
The New York Times

Monday 31 December 2007

Lahore, Pakistan - New details of Benazir Bhutto's final moments, including indications that her doctors felt pressured to conform to government accounts of her death, fueled the arguments over her assassination on Sunday and added to the pressure on Pakistan's leaders to accept an international inquiry.

Athar Minallah, a board member of the hospital where Ms. Bhutto was treated, released her medical report along with an open letter showing that her doctors wanted to distance themselves from the government theory that Ms. Bhutto had died by hitting her head on a lever of her car's sunroof during the attack.

In his letter, Mr. Minallah, who is also a prominent lawyer, said the doctors believed that an autopsy was needed to provide the answers to how she actually died. Their request for one last Thursday was denied by the local police chief.

Pakistani and Western security experts said the government's insistence that Ms. Bhutto, a former prime minister, was not killed by a bullet was intended to deflect attention from the lack of government security around her. On Sunday, Pakistani newspapers covered their front pages with photographs showing a man apparently pointing a gun at her from just yards away.

Her vehicle came under attack by a gunman and suicide bomber as she left a political rally in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani Army keeps its headquarters, and where the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency has a strong presence.

The government's explanation, that Ms. Bhutto died after hitting her head as she ducked from the gunfire or was tossed by the force of the suicide blast, has been greeted with disbelief by her supporters, ordinary Pakistanis and medical experts. While some of the mystery could be cleared up by exhuming the body, it is not clear whether Ms. Bhutto's family would give permission, such is their distrust of the government.

Mr. Minallah distributed the medical report with his open letter to the Pakistani news media and The New York Times. He said the doctor who wrote the report, Mohammad Mussadiq Khan, the principal professor of surgery at the Rawalpindi General Hospital, told him on the night of Ms. Bhutto's death that she had died of a bullet wound.

Dr. Khan declined through Mr. Minallah to speak with a reporter on the grounds that he was an employee of a government hospital and was fearful of government reprisals if he did not support its version of events.

The medical report, prepared with six other doctors, does not specifically mention a bullet because the actual cause of the head wound was to be left to an autopsy, Mr. Minallah said. The doctors had stressed to him that "without an autopsy it is not at all possible to determine as to what had caused the injury," he wrote.

But the chief of police in Rawalpindi, Saud Aziz, "did not agree" to the autopsy request by the doctors, Mr. Minallah said in his letter.

A former senior Pakistani police official, Wajahat Latif, who headed the Federal Investigative Agency in the early 1990s, said that in "any case of a suspected murder an autopsy is mandatory." To waive an autopsy, Mr. Latif said, relatives were required to apply for permission.

At a news conference Sunday, Ms. Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, said he had declined a request for a post-mortem examination. "It was an insult to my wife, an insult to the sister of the nation, an insult to the mother of the nation," he said. "I know their forensic reports are useless. I refuse to give them her last remains."

The question of an autopsy has become central to the circumstances of Ms. Bhutto's death because of conflicting versions put forward by the Pakistani government, which have stirred an already deep well of distrust of the government among Ms. Bhutto's supporters and other Pakistanis.

On the night Ms. Bhutto was assassinated, an unidentified Interior Ministry spokesman was quoted by the official Pakistani news agency as saying that she had died of a "bullet wound in the neck by a suicide bomber."

The next day, Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, the Interior Ministry spokesman, recast that version of events, saying at a news conference that Ms. Bhutto died of a wound sustained when she hit her head on a lever attached to the sun roof of the vehicle as she ducked a bullet and was thrown about by the force of the blast. "Three shots were fired but they missed her," Brigadier Cheema said. "Then there was an explosion."

The new images of the men who appear to have been Ms. Bhutto's assassins showed one dressed in a sleeveless black waistcoat and rimless sunglasses, and holding aloft what appeared to be a gun. He had a short haircut and wore the kind of attire reminiscent of plainclothes intelligence officials, though Al Qaeda and other militants have also been known to dress attackers in Western-style clothing in order to disguise them.

That man is seen standing in front of another whose head is covered in a shawl in the style of Pashtun men from the Pakistan's tribal areas, where Al Qaeda has regrouped in the past year. He is described in the newspaper Dawn as the suicide bomber.

Mr. Minallah, the hospital board member, said Ms. Bhutto's doctors raised the likelihood of a bullet killing her in their report, when they wrote, "Two to three tiny radio-densities underneath fracture segment are observed on both projections."

The report said the doctors tried for 41 minutes to revive her. It said "the patient was pulseless and was not breathing," when she arrived at the hospital. "A wound was present on the right temporoparietal region, through which blood was trickling down and whitish material which looked like brain matter was visible in the wound," it said.

Ms. Bhutto's colleagues who were in the vehicle with her said the interior was covered in blood, and the doctors wrote that "her clothes were soaked with blood."

An account of her death that did not involve a gunshot wound was the optimal explanation for the government, said Bruce Riedel, an expert on Pakistan at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and a former member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. "If there is a gunshot wound, the security was abysmal," Mr. Riedel said. The government did not want to be exposed on its careless approach to security, he said.

On Sunday, Ms. Bhutto's husband, Mr. Zardari, said he received a call from the Punjab home secretary on Thursday evening with a request for his permission for a post-mortem examination. He said he refused because he did not trust the government investigation to prove the cause of her death.

In ordinary circumstances, an autopsy runs counter to Islamic belief that a body should not be tampered with and should be buried as quickly as possible. But several Pakistanis said that in certain classes of Muslim society, particularly the better educated and more urban people, autopsies were not ruled out on religious grounds.

There were also provisions under Pakistani law for the exhumation of a body and a delayed post-mortem, Mr. Latif, the former senior Pakistani police official, said. In those cases, the state or a family can ask a magistrate for exhumation. The magistrate then forms a board of doctors to carry out the procedures, he said.

An international inquiry on Ms. Bhutto's death could not be carried out without an exhumation, a difficult decision in a Muslim country, Mr. Latif said.

In response to a question at a heated news conference Saturday, Brigadier Cheema, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said the government was ready to exhume the body if the family asked.

But Ms. Bhutto's supporters noted that the family and the party were so furious at President Musharraf, whom many of them blame for her death, that it was unlikely the Bhuttos would trust an exhumation that involved the government.

Pressure came from a number of quarters for an inquiry modeled after one carried out by the United Nations after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister, in 2005.

Though the Lebanon inquiry has moved very slowly, American and British officials, as well as an increasing number of Pakistanis, said that an investigation under the United Nations or some other international effort would restore confidence in the Pakistani government.

On Sunday a conference of Ms. Bhutto's party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, called for an inquiry led by the United Nations.

The Speaker of the House of Representatives in the United States Congress, Nancy Pelosi, said Saturday that the Bush administration should condition its future aid to Pakistan on its willingness to undertake an independent international inquiry.

David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said Britain was ready to offer whatever help was needed.

Brigadier Cheema made clear, however, that an international inquiry was not in the cards. "At this point in time we are quite confident with the kind of progress that is going on with our inquiries," he said Sunday.

Foreign experts did not have the expertise, he said, to deal with the peculiarities of tribal areas that are the base of the nation's terrorist activities. "This is not just an ordinary criminal case where you only need forensic expert," he said. "We understand the dynamics better."

*** Oh my gawd! Another hosted article from http://www.truthout.org !