New Video, New Questions in Bhutto Assassination

By Rick Moran

A new video of the assassination that emerged yesterday appears to show former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto being hit by gunfire just prior to a suicide bomber blowing himself up. The pictures show a gunman firing at Bhutto and her headscarf flying up indicating a probable hit by one or more bullets.

The video also shows the suicide bomber blew himself up a second after the gunman fired a third shot. In addition, the pictures seem to show Bhutto already back inside the car when the bomb went off thus giving the lie to the government's contention that she was killed by hitting her head on the sun roof's lever.

There is also a report that doctors were pressured to conform to the government's version of events:

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.

More facts are coming to light that President Musharraf evidently refused to increase security for Bhutto and that he even denied Bhutto's request to hire her own western bodyguards.

Meanwhile, Doctors are coming forward, contradicting the official version of events:

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.

Pressure is building for an international tribunal to investigate the killing. The investigation would be modeled after the Hariri Tribunal in Lebanon which has yet to sit and hear any evidence despite being in existence for most of the last year.

If Musharraf is smart, he'll allow the Tribunal to investigate. As long as their is doubt about the government story there will be unrest. And with elections just a couple of weeks away, it would seem to be the right move to take some of the fire out of the rioters.