Former Prime Minister Of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, Assassinated

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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/24001.html

Bhutto report: Musharraf planned to fix elections

By Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers

• Posted on Monday, December 31, 2007

NAUDERO, Pakistan — The day she was assassinated last Thursday, Benazir Bhutto had planned to reveal new evidence alleging the involvement of Pakistan's intelligence agencies in rigging the country's upcoming elections, an aide said Monday.

Bhutto had been due to meet U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to hand over a report charging that the military Inter-Services Intelligence agency was planning to fix the polls in the favor of President Pervez Musharraf.

Safraz Khan Lashari, a member of the Pakistan People's Party election monitoring unit, said the report was "very sensitive" and that the party wanted to initially share it with trusted American politicians rather than the Bush administration, which is seen here as strongly backing Musharraf.

"It was compiled from sources within the (intelligence) services who were working directly with Benazir Bhutto," Lashari said, speaking Monday at Bhutto's house in her ancestral village of Naudero, where her husband and children continued to mourn her death.

The ISI had no official comment. However, an agency official, speaking only on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak on the subject, dismissed the allegations as "a lot of talk but not much substance."

Musharraf has been highly critical of those who allege that his regime is involved in electoral manipulation. "Now when they lose, they'll have a good rationale: that it is all rigged, it is all fraud," he said in November. "In Pakistan, the loser always cries."

According to Lashari, the document includes information on a "safe house" allegedly being run by the ISI in a central neighborhood of Islamabad, the alleged headquarters of the rigging operation.

It names as the head of the unit a brigadier general recently retired from the ISI, who was secretly assigned to run the rigging operation, Lashari said. It charges that he was working in tandem with the head of a civilian intelligence agency. Before her return to Pakistan, Bhutto, in a letter to Musharraf, had named the intelligence official as one of the men she accused of plotting to kill her.

Lashari said the report claimed that U.S. aid money was being used to fix the elections. Ballots stamped in favor of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, which supports Musharraf, were to be produced by the intelligence agencies in about 100 parliamentary constituencies.

"They diverted money from aid activities. We had evidence of where they were spending the money," Lashari said.

Lashari, who formerly taught environmental economics at Britain's Cranfield University, said the effort was directed at constituencies where the result was likely to be decided by a small margin, so it wouldn't be obvious.

Bhutto was due to meet Specter and Kennedy after dinner last Thursday. She was shot as she left an election rally in Rawalpindi early that evening. Pakistan's government claims instead that she was thrown against the lever of her car's sunroof, fracturing her skull.

(Shah is a McClatchy special correspondent.)

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Pakistani election delayed until Feb. 18
Pakistani Election Officials Delay Parliamentary Elections for 6 Weeks Until Feb. 18

http://www.rawstory.com/news/mochila..._01022008.html

Jan 02, 2008 07:33 EST

Pakistani election officials announced Wednesday that they were delaying parliamentary elections for six weeks until Feb. 18 because of the violence and chaos that followed the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

The elections had been scheduled for Jan. 8, but Qazi Mohammed Farooq, head of the election commission, said it would be impossible to hold the polls on that day.

Election officials reported that rioters in Bhutto's home province of Sindh burned down 10 election offices, destroying the voter rolls and ballot boxes inside. The violence also halted the printing and distribution of ballots.

Because of the situation following Bhutto's death "for a few days the election process came to a complete halt," Farooq said.

The opposition had demanded the polls take place on time and some leaders had called for street protests if they were to be delayed.

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Ministry backtracks on Bhutto sunroof claims

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapc...psy/index.html

1/2/2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- Pakistan's Interior Ministry backtracked Tuesday on its statement that Benazir Bhutto died because she hit her head on a sunroof latch during a shooting and bomb attack.

The government also published a reward offer in several national newspapers to anyone who could identify two suspects from the killing.

Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema told CNN the ministry will wait for the findings from forensic investigators before making a conclusion about her cause of death.

Cheema said he based his statement Friday about the sunroof latch "on the initial investigations and the reports by the medical doctors" who treated her at Rawalpindi General Hospital.

"I was just narrating the facts, you know, and nothing less nothing more," Cheema said.

"There's no intention to conceal anything from the people of Pakistan," an Interior Ministry news release said.

The reward offer, which appeared with photographs of the dead suspects, said that "the person identifying these terrorists will be awarded a cash prize of 5 million rupees (about $81,400) and his identity will also be kept confidential" -- a total reward available of 10 million.

"The response from the public has been nil so far," Punjab spokesman Ashfaq Gondal said Tuesday afternoon.

Athar Minallah, a lawyer on the board that manages Rawalpindi General Hospital, told CNN Monday that doctors did not make the statements attributed to them by the government.

The medical report -- obtained by CNN from Minallah -- made no mention of the sunroof latch and listed the cause of death as "Open head injury with depressed skull fracture, leading to Cardiopulmonary arrest." Read Bhutto's full medical report

Pakistan's Interior Ministry said Thursday it was from a bullet or shrapnel wound, but then it announced a day later that Bhutto died from a skull fracture suffered when she fell or ducked into the car as a result of the shots or the explosion and crashed her head into a sunroof latch.

Bhutto's family and political party maintain that the government is lying, and insist she died from gunshot wounds.

Several videos show a gunman firing a pistol toward her just moments before a bomb detonated nearby as she left a rally.

The U-turn on the sunroof claims will only heighten speculation as to the exact cause of Bhutto's death.

Minallah issued an open letter Monday and released the doctors' clinical notes to distance them from the government statement.

In the letter, Minallah said the doctors "suggested to the officials to perform an autopsy," but that Saud "did not agree." He noted that under the law, police investigators have "exclusive responsibility" in deciding to have an autopsy.

Minallah told CNN that he was speaking out because the doctors at the hospital were "threatened."

"They are government servants who cannot speak; I am not," he said. He did not elaborate on the threats against the doctors.

He said the lack of an autopsy has created "a perception that there is some kind of cover-up, though I might not believe in that theory."

"There is a state within the state, and that state within the state does not want itself to be held accountable," Minallah said.

The three-page medical report, which was signed by seven doctors, described Bhutto's head wound, but it did not conclude what caused it. It noted that X-ray images were made after she was declared dead.

The wound was described as an irregular oval of about 5 centimeters by 3 centimeters above her right ear. "Sharp bones edges were felt in the wound," it read. "No foreign body was felt in the wound."

Rawalpindi's police chief was accused Monday of stopping doctors at the hospital where Bhutto died from conducting an autopsy.

It was a violation of Pakistani criminal law and prevented a medical conclusion about what killed the former prime minister, said Minallah.

However, the police chief involved, Aziz Saud, told CNN that he suggested an autopsy be done -- but that Bhutto's husband objected.

Cheema said the government had no objection to Bhutto's body being exhumed for an autopsy if the family requested it.

Her widower,Asif Ali Zardari, has said the family was against exhumation because it did not trust the government.

Minallah said the family could not have prevented an autopsy at the hospital without getting an order from a judge.

The revelations about the exact cause of Bhutto's death came after new videotape of her assassination emerged, showing her slumping just after gunshots rang out.

The tape provided the clearest view yet of the attack and appeared to show that Bhutto was shot. That would contradict the Pakistan government's account.

A previously released videotape showed a man at the right of her vehicle raising a gun, pointing it toward Bhutto, who was standing in her car with her upper body through the sunroof. He fired three shots, then there was an explosion.

In the video that emerged on Sunday, Bhutto was standing, and her hair and scarf appeared to move, perhaps from the bullet. Bhutto fell into the car, then came the blast. Watch new tape showing apparent gunman »

These images seem to support the theory that Bhutto died at the hands of a shooter before a bomb was detonated, killing another 23 people.

Bhutto's husband, in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer Monday, called for an international investigation into his wife's death, saying the new video proves the Pakistani government "has been trying to muddy the water from the first day." See the likely sequence of events »

"Everything is now very clear that she was shot," Asif Ali Zardari said.

Zardari also called on the U.S. government to push for an international probe. "I want them to help me find out who killed my wife, the mother of my children," he said of the Bush administration.

The reward offer announced: "The public is hereby informed that the two individuals in the above photograph are the accused terrorists involved in the Liaqat Bagh, Rawalpindi Terror Attack, which resulted in the death of the Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto and others." 'Mohtarma' is a title of respect in the Urdu language.

"The person identifying these terrorists will be awarded a cash prize of 5 million rupees (about $81,400) and his identity will also be kept confidential," said Punjab Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi -- a total reward available of 10 million.

"The response from the public has been nil so far," Punjab spokesman Ashfaq Gondal said Tuesday afternoon.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shuja-...tml?view=print

Will We Ever Know Who Killed Benazir Bhutto?

Posted January 4, 2008 | 02:24 PM (EST)

If Pakistani history is any guide: probably not.

As the latest video report from Channel 4 of the United Kingdom now streaming across the internet and numerous eyewitness accounts attest, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was shot by a seemingly professional, cool, clean-shaven young assassin in dark glasses standing within a few feet of her car, as she emerged from a successful rally in Liaquat Bagh, Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007. The video shows him calmly moving in her direction, accompanied by another man whose head was shrouded in a white sheet: the suspected suicide bomber. The film shows her head jerk suddenly as if hit by a bullet and then shows her fall inside her vehicle before the suicide bomb explosion that killed and injured scores around her car.

Yet the Pakistan government, which presented its "initial investigation" findings last week, insisted she had died as a result of a skull fracture -- one that was caused as her head hit the lever of her car's sunroof after the bomb explosion. This government presentation was made by the same spokesman who was reportedly quoted in the immediate aftermath of the attack as saying she was unhurt and had been driven away from the scene.

There will be calls for investigations, domestic and foreign. Now President Pervez Musharraf has said that Scotland Yard will be helping Pakistan's investigation and the team has actually arrived in Pakistan. While there is no a priori reason to doubt that Musharraf wishes to solve this murder, history indicates that Pakistan's governments have evaded or mishandled the search for truth in all major terrorist attacks and subsequent deaths, including those of heads of government and state and the Pakistan army.

Take the case of Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was shot dead by a lone assassin on 16 October 1951 in Company Bagh, Rawalpindi. This was the same location where Ms. Bhutto was killed last month, renamed in memory of the first assassinated prime minister. The killer -- a Pashtun named Said Akbar- was immediately shot and killed by a police officer, even as the crowd tried to subdue him. The government appointed a high level judicial commission to inquire into the assassination. The investigation team was headed by a senior police officer and assisted by Britain's Scotland Yard. It took ten months to produce a report that did little but produce various conspiracy theories. The main focus appeared to be on the "insiders", Punjabi politicians who resented the supremacy of the "outsider" prime minister, an émigré from India to the new Muslim state. Further investigations were being conducted when the senior police officer in charge of the case was asked to bring all the documents to the new prime minister. The plane he was taking to his meeting with the prime minister crashed en route, killing him and destroying all the documents. Liaquat's death was never solved.

On August 17, 1988, Pakistan's dictator and army chief President General Zia ul Haq, who had ruled the country after overthrowing Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in July 1977, took off from Bahawalpur, southern Punjab, for Rawalpindi in a US-supplied C-130. Within minutes, the plane went into a series of fatal "phugoid" or yo-yo like movements and then crashed into the desert Zia was killed instantly, as were several high-ranking officials, including the US ambassador Arnold Raphael, military attaché Brigadier General Herbert M. Wassom, the chairman of the Pakistan Joint Chiefs of Staff General Akhtar Abdur Rahman and a score of senior army officers plus the crew. Two crates of mangoes had been loaded onto the heavily guarded plane before it took off. My research and those of others indicates that a nerve agent was released from timed devices in the aircraft rapidly immobilizing its crew and passengers. Some of the nerve agents may have been hidden in those exploding mangoes. No mayday call was issued. Zia's vice chief and successor General Mirza Aslam Beg told his army colleagues a few days later in a speech at army headquarters that he suspected insiders and would pursue and catch them to bring them to justice. But nothing definitive happened. The FBI involvement in the investigation, mandated by law at that time, was brought to a halt by the Centcom Commander at the time General George Crist, according to Beth Jones, the acting ambassador of the US embassy. No FBI agents were allowed into the country till seven months after the crash. Key pieces of evidence disappeared from the crash site and the hangar where parts of the crashed C-130 were kept.

The Pakistan military did not even put the investigation on the agenda of the first meeting in October 1988 of the joint chiefs after Zia's death. The US did not wish to create further instability in Pakistan. It found allies in the Pakistani army's higher command. The sons of Zia and Abdur Rahman wished to pursue the case but apparently were dissuaded by their US intelligence contacts, who had worked closely with Zia and Rahman in the prosecution of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. To this day, the public does not know who killed Zia nor why.

On January 8, 1993, the Pakistan army chief, General Asif Nawaz, my elder brother, suffered a massive heart attack while exercising at his home in Rawalpindi and died shortly afterward in the military hospital. Two months earlier he had become nauseous, sweating profusely after imbibing something at the Joint Chiefs of Staff Headquarters. He told me that Army doctors told him that he had food poisoning. Later at a judicial inquiry into his death they changed their diagnosis to an inner ear infection. General Nawaz's wife received anonymous letters claiming that people in then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's office had conspired to poison him over time. They did not provide any tangible proof of those charges. Tests on his hair samples conducted on my behalf by an independent laboratory in the United States that summer showed lethal traces of arsenic. A foreign investigation was requested by his wife. But the three-person team from the US, UK, and France that conducted the exhumation and subsequent tests came up with a delayed report that indicated that there was no arsenic in his system! That report was never released to the public. No attempt was made subsequently to determine the huge discrepancy in these results. The mystery remains till someone comes forward from within the US government at that time or from Pakistan. A freedom of information request by me for information from the Department of State is still pending.

On September 20, 1996, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, the estranged brother of then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and leader of a breakaway faction of his father's party, and six of his supporters were shot to death by police on a darkened street in front of his home in Karachi's tiny neighborhood of Clifton. A large police contingent was posted to the area. Yet his bleeding body lay for some time before it was taken to a hospital. No one knew why the lights had been switched off on that road that night. Accusations were leveled against Prime Minister Bhutto's husband Asif Ali Zardari, whom Murtaza Bhutto had reportedly insulted by shaving off half his mustache, and separately against President Farooq Leghari, seen at odds with Ms. Bhutto at that time. Both denied involvement. Zardari was charged with the murder after Bhutto's government was removed. But nothing was proven. The crime scene had been washed of all evidence. And a Scotland Yard team that was brought in could shed no light on what happened or why.

Now, another Prime Minister of Pakistan is dead at the hand of an assassin. There are calls for an independent inquiry. Zardari is asking for a UN inquiry along the lines of the Hariri Commission that investigated the death of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The Government of Pakistan may mount its own judicial inquiry. It is in its own interest for the government of President Pervez Musharraf to reach the bottom of the truth in this latest death. But in the best of circumstances, most governmental efforts of this kind in Pakistan's history have been marked by either incompetence or mal-intent, or both. If the past is any indicator, this death too will remain a mystery.

Within hours of the death, the firemen were in action hosing down the crime scene and washing away whatever key evidence might have been available in the aftermath of the death of Ms. Bhutto. Neither the Government of Pakistan nor the US Administration seemed to favor an independent inquiry. Scotland Yard's belated arrival and their uncertain ability to work independently of the Pakistani authorities will mar their findings. Latest reports indicate that Pakistani authorities say they were unable to get fingerprints from the pistol used by the assassin. The people of Pakistan's desire to reach the truth behind a major leader's death will likely be short changed once again. They deserve better.

This year more than 3,350 deaths have been linked to terrorist attacks in Pakistan, more than twice the number in 2006 and five times the number killed in 2005. In 2002, there were two suicide attacks in Pakistan. In 2007, there have been at least 45. A recent Gallup Poll indicated that roughly half of all Pakistanis polled were fearful of walking alone in their areas at night, a drop from 71 per cent in 2005. Against this evidence, the government will have a hard time to make its case that it is winning the fight against terrorism or that it will get to the bottom of Benazir Bhutto's murder.

Shuja Nawaz is the author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its army, and the wars within (forthcoming) from Oxford University Press which covers the issues covered in this article in greater detail. He regularly appears as a commentator on television, radio, and at think tanks.

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The Benazir Bhutto dossier: ‘secret service was diverting US aid for fighting militants to rig the elections’

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle3116090.ece

Pakistani former premier Benazir Bhutto
Jeremy Page in Naudero
1/1/2008

On the day she was assassinated, Benazir Bhutto was due to meet two senior American politicians to show them a confidential report alleging that Pakistan’s intelligence service was using US money to rig parliamentary elections, officials in her party said yesterday.

The report was compiled by the former Prime Minister’s own contacts within the security services and alleged that the Inter-Services Intelligence agency was running the election operation from a safe house in the capital, Islamabad, they said. The operation’s aim was to undermine Ms Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and to ensure victory for the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) party, which supports President Musharraf, in the elections scheduled for January 8.

Patrick Kennedy, a Democratic congressman for Rhode Island, and Arlen Specter, a Republican member of the Senate sub-committe on foreign operations, have confirmed that they were planning to have dinner with Ms Bhutto on Thursday evening but were not available for comment yesterday.

Sarfraz Ali Lashari, a senior PPP official who works in its election monitoring cell, told The Times that he had helped to compile a 200-page report on the Government’s efforts to rig the poll, which Ms Bhutto planned to give to the Americans and to the press the day she was killed.

“But there is another report relating to the ISI and she was going to discuss it with them,” said Mr Lashari, an envi-ronmental economist who taught at Cranfield University for several years.

The second report, which Ms Bhutto did not plan to release to the media, alleged that the ISI was using some of the $10 billion (£5 billion) in US military aid that Pakistan has received since 2001 to run a covert election operation from a safe house in G5, a central district of Islamabad, he said.

“The report was done by some people who we’ve got in the services. They directly dealt with Benazir Bhutto,” he continued, adding that Ms Bhutto was planning to share the contents of the report with the British Ambassador as well as the US lawmakers.

Asif Ali Zardari, Ms Bhutto’s widower and the new co-chairman of the PPP, confirmed the existence of the report, its basic contents and Ms Bhutto’s plans to meet the US lawmakers last Thursday. Asked if such a report was in his possession, he said: “Something to that effect.” Asked if Ms Bhutto was planning to share its contents with the American legislators, he said: “I am not in a position to make an answer to that.” Asked if the report contained evidence that the ISI was using US funds to rig the elections, he said: “Possibly so.” He declined to give further details, but said the confidential report could have been one of several motives for killing Ms Bhutto, who died after a suicide-bomb and gun attack on an election rally near Islamabad. “It was a general combination of all of these things. The fact that she’s on the ground exposing everybody, I guess, would have been one reason. There are many views and many reasons one can think of for her assassination.”

The allegation is likely to fuel the already intense speculation surrounding the death, which triggered nationwide riots and raised fears that President Musharraf could reimpose emergency rule and postpone the elections.

Electoral fraud is nothing new in Pakistan, which has been led by military rulers for more than half of its 60-year history, and whose politics is dominated by feudal and tribal loyalties. In 1996 a former army chief called Mirza Aslam Baig alleged in court that he had been aware of a secret ISI political cell that distributed funds to antiPPP candidates in the run-up to the 1990-1991 elections.

Ms Bhutto had often accused President Musharraf, who seized power in a coup in 1999, of rigging elections and there have been reports that foreign financial aid to Pakistan’s Central Election Commission was being used to fix the result of next month’s poll.

However, the report that Ms Bhutto allegedly planned to share with the US politicians made the more serious allegation that the ISI was directly involved in rigging the coming parliamentary elections – and was using American money to do it. The United States has given Pakistan at least $10 billion in military aid since President Musharraf agreed to back the War on Terror after the September 11 attacks.

The money was supposed to be used to help Pakistan’s armed forces to fight al-Qaeda and Taleban militants sheltering in northwestern tribal areas near the porous border with Afghan-istan. But there has been almost no accounting for the funds, most of which have been transferred in cash directly to the Defence Ministry, and critics of President Musharraf say that much has been diverted towards other aims, such as upgrading forces on the border with India, or into private pockets.

This month the US Congress ordered the Government to withhold a portion of military aid to Pakistan until President Musharraf demonstrated progress in the campaign against the militants and in a transition towards civilian, democratic rule.

Mr Lashari, the PPP official, said that Ms Bhutto wanted to share the report with them because she did not entirely trust the US Government, which still regards President Musharraf as a key ally in the War on Terror. “The idea was to discuss it with all the international stakeholders, mainly including Britain and the United States, but we didn’t want to share it with anyone who could use it against us,” he said.

“It would be unwise to do anything that would annoy Musharraf, and the international stakeholders. Everything could collapse if the Army comes to know that there is something substantial against them. It’s dangerous to name people in Pakistan.” Pakistani media reports have alleged the existence of an ISI safe house used to rig the elections and identified Ijaz Hussain Shah, a retired general who heads the civilian Intelligence Bureau, as one of those involved.

Mr Lashari also said that Ms Bhutto was planning to show the report with the British Ambassador, Robert Brin-kley. A spokesman for the British Embassy denied any knowledge of the report. The ISI does not have a spokes-person, but a government official dismissed the allegations as baseless.

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Bhutto 'was about to spill the beans'

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/st...ectid=10485055

5:00AM Thursday January 03, 2008

KARACHI - Benazir Bhutto was poised to offer proof that Pakistan's election commission and shadowy spy agency were seeking to rig an upcoming general election the night she was assassinated, a top aide said.

Senator Latif Khosa, who authored a 160-page dossier with Bhutto documenting rigging tactics, said they ranged from intimidation to fake ballots, and were in some cases unwittingly funded by US aid.

Bhutto had been due to give the report to two visiting US legislators over dinner on the day she was killed in a suicide bombing.

"The state agencies are manipulating the whole process," said Khosa, head of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party election monitoring unit.

"There is rigging by the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), the election commission and the previous government ... They were on the rampage."

President Pervez Musharraf's spokesman Rashid Qureshi dismissed the claim as ridiculous.

"It makes one laugh," he said. "The President has said a free, fair, transparent and peaceful election is essential, which forms part of his overall strategy for transforming Pakistan into a fully democratic [nation].

"Take it from me, it's going to be perhaps the best election that Pakistan has ever had."

Khosa said the report, entitled "Yet another stain on the face of democracy", detailed how the spy agency was planning to issue 25,000 pre-stamped ballots for each of 108 candidates for national assembly seats in Punjab from the party that backs President Musharraf.

He said the ISI also had a "mega computer" which could hack into any computer and was connected to the Election Commission's system.

An initial draft list of voters published in June put the electorate at 52 million people, more than 20 million short, triggering a backlash from Musharraf's political opponents.

The Supreme Court ordered the commission to revise the list, and in October it raised the total to 80 million.

"Benazir was supposed to hold a press conference. It was going to be distributed to everyone, but unfortunately that did not arise because she was assassinated," Khosa said.

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CBS, CNN obtain secret dossier alleging Pakistani vote-rigging scheme

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/CNN_CB...tion_0102.html

David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Wednesday January 2, 2008

At the time she was assassinated, Pakistani opposition leader Benezir Bhutto was just hours away from meeting with two US lawmakers to hand them a dossier alleging that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) was plotting with its Election Commission to rig the upcoming elections.

According to CBS News, which has obtained a copy of the report, it "alleges widespread plans to stuff ballot boxes, rig voting lists, and intimidate, even kill, opposition voters."

CNN quotes the document more specifically as saying, "Where an opposing candidate is strong in an area, they have planned to create a conflict at the polling station, even killing people if necessary, to stop polls at least three to four hours."

The report, titled "Another Stain on the Face of Democracy," was compiled from Bhutto's own sources within the police and intelligence services. It was to be given to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), because Bhutto did not trust the Bush administration, which is seen in Pakistan as strongly backing Musharraf.

The dossier also accuses Musharraf's regime of diverting US aid into political dirty tricks, charging that "ninety percent of the equipment that the USA gave the government of Pakistan to fight terrorism ... is being used to monitor and to keep a check on political opponents."

Pakistani Senator Latif Khosa told CBS, "The ISI has set up a mega-computer system which has the capacity to hack any of the computers in Pakistan, and it is connected with the Election Commission of Pakistan's computers and therefore they will overturn the results." Khosa also charged that computers are being used to change the voter rolls.

Pakistan's government has called the allegations "ludicrous." Musharraf's top spokesman told CNN that he had never heard of the dossier but that the allegations were "just a pack of lies ... laughable ... ridiculous."

CNN analyst Peter Bergen noted, "There's no reason to believe that she was killed because of this dossier, because the people behind her killing almost certainly are al Qaeda and the Taliban, and they've got nothing to do with this election." That is the official Pakistani position, based primarily on allegations of intercepted phone calls from a pro-Taliban warlord who has denied any involvement.

Bhutto herself had accused Gen. Ijaz Hussain Shah, who has been named in the Pakistani media as part of the vote-rigging effort, of plotting to kill her. Shah, described as a close personal friend of President Musharraf, is a former ISI official who now heads the civilian Intelligence Bureau, which supplied many of the guards surrounding Bhutto's vehicle at the time of an earlier attempt on her life in October.

This video is from CBS's Early Show, broadcast on January 1, 2008.

Video At Source

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You'll remember the report about Osama's "handling officer" being in charge of Benazir Bhutto's security at the time of the first bombing in October:

http://in.rediff.com/news/2007/oct/19raman.htm

"Brig Ejaz Shah has been strongly criticised by Benazir and her supporters for the security failure and they have demanded his removal and arrest."

Now it's found that Benazir Bhutto was going to deliver a report to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), "because Bhutto did not trust the Bush administration, which is seen in Pakistan as strongly backing Musharraf" that accuses Osama's "handling officer" of taking part in "an ISI safe house used to rig the elections" the night she was assassinated.

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Interesting.

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Interesting.

Very.