Posted on 10/19/2007 7:15:19 PM PDT by blam
Benazir Bhutto blames rogue officials for bomb
By Isambard Wilkinson in Karachi
Last Updated: 3:05am BST 20/10/2007
Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's former prime minister, accused rogue government officials yesterday of organising the suicide attack on her homecoming procession that killed at least 138 people.
Benazir Bhutto tried to galvanise support for a campaign against terrorism
Speaking for the first time since the assassination attempt in Karachi, Ms Bhutto tried to galvanise support for a campaign against terrorism.
"We are prepared to risk our lives. We're prepared to risk our liberty. But we're not prepared to surrender this great nation to militants," said Ms Bhutto, wearing a black armband.
It was the country's worst suicide attack and cast a cloud over hopes that her return, under an American-backed deal reached with President Pervez Musharraf, might end months of unrest.
Ms Bhutto said that her enemies in the government were collaborating with terrorists and plotting against her.
"I am not accusing the government. I am accusing people, certain individuals who abuse their positions, who abuse their powers," she said.
Ms Bhutto said that she had passed the names of three suspects to Gen Musharraf before her return. She said that the names were given to her by a "brotherly country" — a term often used by Pakistani officials to refer to Saudi Arabia.
Ms Bhutto said her bodyguards from the "Janbaz", or "martyr force", had prevented her assassination. "They stood their ground, and they stood all around the truck, and they refused to let the suicide bomber get near the truck," she said.
Yesterday, Karachi's streets were mostly empty as shops and schools were closed and thousands of people searched for relatives.
At the mortuary of the Edhi Foundation, a welfare trust, 110 bodies were washed, swathed in shrouds and stacked on three-tired metal bunks awaiting collection by relatives.
"The people who died belonged to the poor classes," said the mortuary's director, Fasal Edhi, the son of its founder, Abdul Sattur, who is venerated in Pakistan for retrieving the daily toll of paupers' corpses from ditches and waste heaps.
Many of Ms Bhutto's thousands of supporters — who included impoverished peasants and members of Pakistan's beleaguered Christian and Hindu minorities — had travelled for four days to join the welcoming procession.
Some came out of political belief, others in exchange for a bag of flour.
Standing next to a box filled with 4ft ice blocks that refrigerate the mortuary, Noor Khan Barfat, 31, had found the body of his brother, Amir Khan, 21, a member of Ms Bhutto's personal guard, in the rear of the room that resembled a ghastly compartment of a sleeper train.
"He was happy that Benazir had come back and he was part of the procession," said Mr Barfat, from Karachi's poor district of Malir. After spending hours helping to clear away the dead and wounded from the scene, he discovered that his brother had been killed.
The bomb-damaged lorry in which Benazir Bhutto was travelling
"Benazir is not in favour of extremism," said Mr Barfat. "That is why she was targeted."
Ms Bhutto had praised party workers and policemen who had "lost their lives defending the leadership of the nation's party".
The silence of the mortuary was broken when angry relatives punched the air. "We will sacrifice 10 more brothers for the cause," said one.
Some critics questioned whether Ms Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan People's Party who twice served as prime minister, should bear some responsibility for the deaths of her supporters.
"I know some people will think it was naïve [to return despite death threats]," she said. "But if you believe in a cause you have to pay the price." She said her duty was to mobilise "the people of Pakistan in the political life of their country".
Ehsan Baig found the bodies of his uncles, Tariq and Sajiq, at the mortuary, two businessmen who were not party members but still wanted to get a glimpse of Ms Bhutto.
"They died for nothing," said Mr Baig after loading the two corpses on to an ambulance. "They happened to be at the procession when the terrorists hit."
This ought to increase her popularity with the gov’t and the Taliban.
They “set us up the bomb!”
Well it looks like the issue of wither Pakistan is coming to a head. The next few weeks should be a watershed in the country’s history.
Will the long knives come out and the cancer in the government be destroyed or will the islamists win?
Stay tuned...
Is it my imagination or did she specifically blame “insurgents” or “rebels” for the bomb in an earlier report?
I’m sure this incident has nothing to do with the ROP.
aint living in an islamic country grand? the people die on rubbish dumps, but don't worry, we've got the bomb...
aint living in an islamic country grand? the people die on rubbish dumps, but don't worry, we've got the bomb...
Pak ping
Well, to be fair, most Moslem countries are one big rubbish dump.
Yes, I do specialize in cheap shots. Why do you ask? ;’)
After Bombing, Bhutto Assails Officials’ Ties
****************************EXCERPT*****************************
KARACHI, Pakistan, Oct. 19 — Looking pale and shaken the day after she survived a suicide bomb attack, the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto said Friday that she had warned the Pakistani government that suicide bomb squads were going to go after her on her return to the country and that it had failed to act on the information.
Ms. Bhutto did not blame the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, for the bomb blasts and said extremist Islamic groups who wanted to take over the country were behind the attacks, which killed 134 people.
But she pointed the finger at government officials who she said were sympathetic to the militants and were abusing their powers to advance their cause. She did not identify them on Friday, but said she had in a letter to the government this Tuesday. It was not clear if she was implicating the officials directly or accusing them of dragging their feet on her warning.
“I am not accusing the government, but I am accusing certain individuals who abuse their positions, who abuse their powers,” she said at a news conference of hundreds of journalists in the garden of her home in Clifton, an upscale neighborhood of the southern port city of Karachi.
“I know in my heart who my enemies are,” she added. “There is a poem that says that even if you hide yourself behind seven veils, I can still see your hand.”
While it was not possible to assess the veracity of Ms. Bhutto’s charges, she has long accused parts of the government, namely Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, of working against her and her party because they oppose her liberal, secular agenda.
Aides close to Ms. Bhutto said that one of those named in the letter was Ijaz Shah, the director general of the Intelligence Bureau, another of the country’s intelligence agencies and a close associate of General Musharraf.
Mr. Shah hung up when asked by telephone for a reaction to the allegations.
In order to wipe out the Taliban and its allies, the Pakistani gov’t is going to have to act in a pretty heinous way, and I sure hope they start soon.
Ms. Bhutto did not blame the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, for the bomb blasts and said extremist Islamic groups who wanted to take over the country were behind the attacks, which killed 134 people. But she pointed the finger at government officials who she said were sympathetic to the militants and were abusing their powers to advance their cause.Nice to see that Bhutto believes that she and Musharraf have a common enemy.
Degenerate animal subhumans with a nuklar bomb.
Is Bhutto looking to replace Musharraf?
And they've been that way for a while. Ever read how run down the Holy Land and the Balkans were in the nineteenth century? To Westerners like Mark Twain the poverty and lack of infrastructure was just as much a sign of Turkish rule as a flag with a crescent on it.
I don’t know what the military situation is in the NW Territories but Bhutto / Mushy need to clean out the ISI, the military and then the territories.
Bhutto has a lot of support in the country, maybe together they can get ‘r done.
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