Islamabad: Photographs of two men allegedly involved in the assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto were aired by a Pakistani TV news channel.

One of the two grainy photos -- which Dawn News channel said were clicked by an amateur photographer -- showed a youth wearing sunglasses aiming a pistol at Bhutto's back while she waved through the sun-roof of her bulletproof vehicle to her supporters.

The other picture, apparently taken before the shooting, showed the same youth standing next to another man who had a white cloth wrapped around his face. Dawn News described the second man as the "suspected suicide bomber".

The position of the youth with the pistol in the photo coincided with the position of the shooter seen in video footage of the attack on Bhutto released by the interior ministry on Friday.

In that footage, the face of the shooter is obscured but his hand can be seen holding a pistol that is used to fire three to four shots towards Bhutto after her election rally in Rawalpindi on Thursday.

In the video too, Bhutto had her back towards the shooter. Sherry Rehman, a close aide of Bhutto, has said she died after being hit in the head by a bullet.

Rehman also dismissed as "absolute nonsense" the Interior Ministry stand that Bhutto had died after fracturing her skull against a metal lever on the sun-roof of her vehicle during the suicide attack.

But Rehman's contention was rejected by interior ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema, who offered to exhume Bhutto's body to conduct an autopsy to settle the controversy over how she had died.

Source : PTI