Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) seemed headed for victory in the January 8 parliamentary elections when tragedy struck.

The electoral prospects of the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League (Q), also known as the Q League, looked bleak as pre-election polls showed that voters overwhelmingly supported the PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (N).
This turn of events was a nightmare for the Q League, a splinter group of the original Pakistan Muslim League, and its leaders, like Chaudhry Pervez Elahi and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, two of the shadiest politicians of Gujarat city, who emerged as “national leaders” in the absence of the mainstream political leaders Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.
Things were not proceeding as the Q League and their handlers in the country’s military-bureaucracy establishment had planned. They had envisioned a future in which the Q League would be the clear winner or at least in a position to form a government with the help of its allies.
But a completely different scenario began to take shape. The PPP and the Muslim League (N) appeared set to sweep the national elections. The idea of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister, backed by the powerful Nawaz Sharif, sent shock waves to those who hold the levers of power in Islamabad.
And then Benazir Bhutto, the country’s most popular leader, was assassinated shortly after attending a public campaign rally on Thursday in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, adjoining Islamabad.
Now, who would benefit from this assassination?
Ms. Bhutto was reportedly attacked by two shooters, who first fired at her neck, head and chest, with one afterwards detonating explosives attached to his body, killing the high-profile leader and thirty of her supporters, while the other escaped.
One bullet cut through her windpipe, causing her death, the doctors said.
However, the government on Friday gave a clumsy explanation of Ms. Bhutto’s assassination, claiming that she was attacked by Al-Qaeda and had died due to injuries sustained when an iron lock from her vehicle’s sunroof fell on her head, and not by gunshots. This was dismissed by the top aide of Ms. Bhutto, lawyer Farooq Naik, as a “pack of lies”.
And PPP spokeswoman Sherry Rehman, who helped wash the body for burial, said, “There was a bullet wound I saw that went in from the back of her head and came out the other side.”
“This is ridiculous, dangerous nonsense because it is a cover-up of what actually happened,” Rehman added.
New video clips aired on the Pakistani television network Dawn News on Saturday evening showed a youth wearing sunglasses aiming a pistol at Ms. Bhutto’s back while she waved through the sunroof of her bulletproof vehicle to her supporters, the Aljazeera satellite television network reported.
Another video clip, 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 Ministry of the Interior on Saturday.
Total chaos has engulfed Pakistan since the murder of Ms. Bhutto. Violence has erupted everywhere, and all the major cities are in flames. PPP supporters are not only chanting slogans against President Pervez Musharraf and the Q League but are also attacking security forces, government buildings, and public property. Pakistan is burning and there seems to be no end in sight.
In such a situation, it is doubtful that the parliamentary elections can be held as scheduled on January 8. Nawaz Sharif has announced that his party will boycott the elections out of respect for Ms. Bhutto, and the Pakistan People’s Party has announced that it will observe a 40-day mourning period. If the government insists on holding the election on January 8, without the participation of two of the leading political parties, the poll will have no credibility.
For the past thirty years, since Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s arrest in 1977 and the later judicial murder ordered by then military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq in April 1979, the anti-Bhutto elements within Pakistan’s military-bureaucracy establishment have been at war with the Bhutto family and its supporters.
First, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed, then his two sons, Shahnawaz and Mir Murtaza, were killed, with the culprits never being apprehended, and now his daughter Benazir, the last politically active member of the Bhutto clan, has been assassinated.
Religious extremists had allegedly vowed to kill her because of her supposedly close ties with the West, liberal democratic ideas, and the unwanted attention she had paid to the religious seminaries when she was in power, but her assassination didn’t look like the handiwork of the retrogressive forces.
Ms. Bhutto believed that some rogue elements from Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Pakistan Army also played a significant role in orchestrating the assassination attempt against her after her arrival from exile last October.
Eight hours before boarding her flight from Dubai to Karachi on October 18, she wrote an email to UPI editor at large Arnaud De Borchgrave, naming people she suspected sought to kill her on the day she returned.
On December 28, CNN quoted an e-mail Bhutto sent on October 26 to Mark Siegel, her U.S. spokesman, lobbyist and friend, in which she said:
“I have been made to feel insecure by his (Musharraf’s) minions and there is no way what is happening in terms of stopping me from taking private cars or using tinted windows or giving jammers or four police mobiles to cover all sides cld happen without him.”
In a syndicated article published on December 28, Eric Margolis wrote:
“Shortly after the first attempt on her life in Karachi, Benazir, who always wrote to me as ‘Bibi,’ told me that she suspected Punjabi politicians in Musharraf’s Muslim League-Q Party were behind the attempt on her life last October.”
This was most likely a slightly veiled reference to the inimicable Chaudhry duo of the Q League.
Ms. Bhutto’s assassination is a multilayered tragedy for Pakistan. The province of Sindh was already estranged with the military establishment and with Punjab, since most high–ranking military officers come from that province, and now the Sindhis are even more incensed.
During her last visit to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in his death row cell on April 3, 1979, Benazir Bhutto promised her father that she would continue his mission.
Even though her two terms as prime minister were viewed as a disappointment and many PPP supporters believed she did not efficiently uphold the Bhutto legacy, she did lay down her life in the struggle to democratize Pakistan.
Pakistan’s rulers need to put balm on the wounds of the Bhutto family and all of the people of Pakistan, especially the Sindhis, who are completely devastated by the tragic death of the daughter of their home province