Rezaul H Laskar

Islamabad: The Pakistan government today blamed the Al-Qaida for the assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto, saying the terror group was responsible for a series of suicide bombings aimed at destabilising the country.

Interior ministry spokesman Brig Javed Iqbal Cheema said, "Al-Qaida commander Baitullah Mehsud" masterminded the suicide bombing against Bhutto and intelligence agencies had intercepted a conversation in which he congratulated certain persons for the attack.

Cheema also told a news conference that Bhutto had not been struck by a bullet or shrapnel from the suicide bomb but had died after her skull was fractured when she hit a metal lever on the sun-roof of her armoured vehicle.

The spokesman's account of the reasons for her death was the third since Bhutto was assassinated by a suicide bomber after an election rally in Rawalpindi yesterday.

PPP leaders had initially said Bhutto was hit by shots fired by the suicide attacker, while caretaker Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz Khan later said a medical report indicated she was injured by shrapnel during the blast.

Video of the attack on Bhutto was shown at the news conference and three shots could be heard before the suicide bomber detonated his explosives. Cheema also pointed out the attacker was on the left side of the vehicle while Bhutto was injured on the right side of her skull.

Cheema released photos of the bloodstained lever of the car's sun-roof and X-rays which he said showed that no foreign elements were present in Bhutto's body. He said there was "no ambiguity" about cause of Bhutto's death.

Cheema said the Al-Qaida was targeting Pakistan's "state institutions in order to destabilise the country" and that Baitullah Mehsud was also behind the two suicide blasts during Bhutto's homecoming rally in Karachi in October that killed nearly 140 people.

"We have irrefutable evidence that Al-Qaida, its networks and cohorts are bent on destablising Pakistan, which is a key player in the war on terror," Cheema said.

A transcript of the intercept of Mehsud's conversation, which was recorded at 9.15 am today, showed he had spoken to someone called "Maulvi" who apparently indicated the attack on Bhutto was carried out by three men.

Though Cheema referred to Mehsud as an Al-Qaida commander, he is better known as a Pakistani Taliban commander who was recently made chief of the Tehrik Taliban-e-Pakistan, a new coalition of militant groups from the northwestern tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

Earlier in the day, an Al-Qaida leader based in Afghanistan had claimed responsibility for the assassination of Bhutto.

"We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat (the) mujahadeen," Al-Qaida commander Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid told the Italian news agency Adnkronos International (AKI).

Al-Yazid was described by AKI as the "main Al-Qaida commander in Afghanistan". It reported that the decision to kill Bhutto was made by Al-Qaida No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri in October.

The interior ministry also clarified that an autopsy was not performed on Bhutto's body at the request of her husband Asif Ali Zardari, though doctors had carried out an "external post-mortem" using X-rays.

Cheema and Interior Minister Khan said the government had informed the PPP about the threat to Bhutto's life and told the party that she should be careful in her movements.

They also Bhutto may have survived the attack if she had exposed herself from the sun-roof of her bulletproof vehicle. Cheema also said the jammers provided to Bhutto offered "no protection against suicide attacks".

"Jammers can only protect (someone) if a device is remotely activated through a signal. A suicide attacker activates his device manually, and no equipment that can foil manual activation (of a bomb)," he said.

The PPP had earlier complained the jammers provided to Bhutto were defective.

Source : PTI