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Police abandoned security posts before Bhutto assassination
No autopsy performed on body; docs say bullet
wounds not found
By Nick Juliano
12/28/07 "Raw
Story" -- --
Police abandoned their security posts shortly before Pakistani
opposition leader Benazir Bhutto's assassination Thursday,
according to a journalist present at the time, and unanswerable
questions remain about the cause of her death, because an
autopsy was never performed.
Pakistan's Interior Minister on
Friday said that Bhutto was not killed by gunshots, as had been
widely reported, and doctors at Rawalpindi General Hospital,
where she died, say there were no bullet marks on the former
prime minister's body,
according to India's IBNLive.com. Furthermore, according to
the news agency, there was no formal autopsy performed on
Bhutto's body before she was buried Friday.
CNN is now reporting that it wasn't gunshots or shrapnel
that killed Bhutto, but that she died from hitting the sunroof
of the car she was riding in. The network said sources in
Pakistan's Interior Ministry said nothing entered her skull, no
bullets or shrapnel.
Apparently there was some kind
of lever on the sunroof she was standing through, and she hit
her head on that CNN reported Friday morning.
Earlier in the day Interior
Minister Hamid Nawaz told a Pakistani news channel, “The report
says she had head injuries – an irregular patch – and the X-ray
doesn’t show any bullet in the head. So it was probably the
shrapnel or any other thing has struck her in her said. That
damaged her brain, causing it to ooze and her death. The report
categorically says there’s no wound other than that,"
according to IBNLive.
Perhaps more shockingly, an
attendee at the rally where Bhutto was killed says police
charged with protecting her "abandoned their posts," leaving
just a handful of Bhutto's own bodyguards protecting her.
"Police officers had frisked the
3,000 to 4,000 people attending Thursday's rally when they
entered the park, but as the speakers from Bhutto's Pakistan
People's Party droned on, the police abandoned many of their
posts," wrote Saeed Shah in an
essay published by McClatchy News Service. "As she drove out
through the gate, her main protection appeared to be her own
bodyguards, who wore their usual white T-shirts inscribed:
'Willing to die for Benazir.'"
While some intelligence
officials, especially within the US, were quick to finger al
Qaeda militants as responsible for Bhutto's death, it remains
unclear precisely who was responsible and some speculation has
centered on Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, its
military or even forces loyal to the current president Pervez
Musharraf. Rawalpindi, where Bhutto was killed, is the garrison
city that houses the Pakistani military's headquarters.
"GHQ (general headquarters of
the army) killed her," Sardar Saleem, a former member of
parliament, told Shah at the hospital.
Whatever the case, Bhutto's
precise cause of death may never be known because of the failure
to administer an autopsy. The procedure was not carried out
because police and local authorities in Rawalpindi did not
request one, according to IBNLive, but the government plans a
formal investigation why this was the case.
Musharraf initially blamed her
death on unnamed Islamic militants, but Interior Minister Hamid
Nawaz told The Associated Press on Friday that "we have the
evidence that al-Qaida and the Taliban were behind the suicide
attack on Benazir Bhutto."
He said investigators had
resolved the "whole mystery" behind the opposition leader's
killing and would give details at press conference later Friday
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