Benazir Bhutto and JFK

Benazir's close associates believe she was shot. But Musharraf's government and the Scotland Yard believe the two shots fired at her missed and she was actually killed when the sunroof lever of her bullet proof SUV hit her head as the blast occurred which was immediately followed by gun shots. If the suicide blast theory is accepted then the man who killed her is dead. The two shot theory hangs in the air as the man seen with the handgun in the TV images has not so far been identified. Four other people have been arrested and their trial is in progress in an anti-terrorist court in Rawalpindi. Several routine hearings later, it is leading nowhere. But the scene of occurrence washed off soon after the shooting, and given the lack of interest of the interim government, there was not much that forensic experts could provide by way of evidence anyway. The PPP won the election on February 18, 2008 and formed a coalition government. It is ironical to the extreme that they have ordered no serious investigation into the gruesome murder of their own chairperson. It is all the more mystifying as the one person who calls the shots in this government is her own husband, the acting chairman of the party. A parliamentary resolution demanding a UN investigation seems, as if, to absolve the government of the responsibility. Otherwise, but for a poignant interview by Ms Naheed Khan, the PPP is silent over the issue. The case of John F Kennedy's killing in November 1963 would appear to have some eerie circumstantial similarities with Benazir Bhutto's murder 44 years later. They were both election campaigning when they were killed. BB had just finished addressing a rally whereas Kennedy was on his way to the venue. Kennedy sat in an open Lincoln Continental when he was shot (the bulletproof era had not yet begun); Benazir stood through the sunroof of an otherwise bullet proof SUV. Both had premonitions about security. Before leaving Washington on the 22nd, JFK had expressed concern to Secret Service about a concealed sniper as he reviewed the route plan. In BB's case, she was on record repeatedly about the danger to her life. On October 16, she wrote a will, an unusual thing for a Muslim to do. After she survived the attack on her mammoth reception procession in Karachi killing over a hundred people on October 18, 2007, she wrote to Musharraf and accused three of his top officials of conspiring to kill her. Lastly, the autopsy on Kennedy was not performed in Dallas, something that was required by Texan law. In the confrontation with the Secret Service over jurisdiction the Dallas police was over ruled and the body of the president was flown to Washington. But the similarity ends here. Kennedy's autopsy was done in Washington; Benazir was buried without an autopsy. (Killing the president has since been made a federal offence in the US). In the case of John F Kennedy, 104 eyewitnesses were interrogated. But in the case of Benazir Bhutto no eyewitnesses have been cross-examined, at least not the 6, including the vice chairman of the PPP, who were with her in the vehicle at the relevant time according to Ms Naheed Khan, Ms Bhutto's political secretary sitting next to her. Within a week of Kennedy's murder, the US government appointed a high power commission under Chief Justice Earl Warren to investigate the case. Several years later, a House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was appointed who held another investigation. In BB's case, 6 months have passed since she was killed and no such thing has been done as we knock the UN's door for an enquiry. Such a procedure might have made sense if Fatima Bhutto had demanded the investigation of her father Murtaza's death in 1996 from a third party as the government was antagonistic; but it is Benazir's own party in power in Pakistan today. Why then go to the UN against all advice? This must be the first case of a sovereign country asking the UN to investigate the killing on own soil of a national leader whose political party is in power Not surprising, then, that our foreign minister's claim after his meeting with Ban Ki-Moon in New York on July 10 that the SG had agreed to appoint a commission of enquiry into BB's assassination was rejected, according to the BBC, by the UN. No agreement had been reached, the UN clarified. In any case, the UN procedures are tedious by definition; politicised, long drawn and vulnerable to western influence. Within a day or two of BB's killing, George Bush, Gordon Brown and Pervez Musharraf accused Baitullah Mehsud, a tribal leader (who vociferously denied), of it. In the unlikely event of the UN undertaking the enquiry that is the line it is likely to follow. It is unlikely to go to her mourning supporters to find out the truth about Benazir's death. The writer is a former inspector general of police