Benazir Bhutto Assassination (Dec 27 2007, Rawalpindi)

Introduction

Benazir Bhutto, twice former Prime Minister of Pakistan and leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), was killed on 27 December 2007 in Rawalpindi. She had returned to Pakistan in October 2007 after years of exile, having secured an amnesty from President Pervez Musharraf amid international and US pressure to facilitate her political return ahead of scheduled elections. She had already survived one assassination attempt in Karachi on 18 October 2007, in which more than 150 people were killed.

The killing took place immediately after a campaign rally at Liaquat National Bagh (a historic park with its own political-assassination precedent — Pakistani founding father Liaquat Ali Khan was killed there in 1951). As Bhutto''s vehicle departed, she stood through the sunroof to acknowledge supporters. A gunman fired shots and then detonated a suicide bomb, killing Bhutto and more than twenty bystanders.

The Competing Cause-of-Death Claims

The Musharraf government''s immediate explanation — that Bhutto had not been struck by bullets or shrapnel but had struck her head on the sunroof lever when she ducked at the sound of gunfire, sustaining a fatal skull fracture — was widely disputed. The Pakistani government initially resisted an independent autopsy and had the body washed before a full forensic examination could be conducted.

The 2010 United Nations Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Chilean diplomat Heraldo Muñoz, concluded that Bhutto''s death was caused by the impact of the blast on her skull, but criticised the Pakistani authorities'' handling of evidence extensively. The Commission found that police had hosed down the crime scene within approximately ninety minutes of the attack, eliminating forensic traces that might have established the precise mechanism of death and the identity of the planners.

Evidence Destruction

The UN Commission''s finding of deliberate evidence destruction is the most substantiated element of what would otherwise be speculative conspiracy framing. Hosing down a bomb-and-shooting crime scene within ninety minutes is not standard forensic practice; it is, at best, catastrophic negligence and at worst deliberate concealment. The Commission used the phrase ''failure to protect'' and ''deliberate obstruction'' in its conclusions about the Pakistani police''s conduct.

This documented evidence destruction is what elevates the Bhutto case from a simple ''who did it'' question to a genuine accountability question involving state actors.

TTP Attribution and Its Limits

Pakistani and some US intelligence attributed the attack to Baitullah Mehsud, the then-leader of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Intercepted communications purportedly showed Mehsud congratulating associates on the killing. Mehsud was killed in a US drone strike in August 2009 before he could face trial or questioning.

Critics of the Mehsud attribution note that it conveniently focused blame on a remote militant actor and away from closer political figures. The evidence for Mehsud''s operational role is real but was never subjected to adversarial legal scrutiny. His death foreclosed that possibility.

Political Accountability

Five individuals were convicted in September 2017 of charges related to the assassination. Pervez Musharraf was charged in absentia in 2017 for alleged failure to provide adequate security — charges that critics said were too narrow given the evidence-destruction findings. Musharraf remained in self-imposed exile in Dubai (he died in February 2023) and never faced trial on the assassination charges.

Verdict

Partially true. The assassination occurred as described and was an unambiguous political killing. The evidence destruction documented by the UN Commission is real and represents a substantiated accountability failure. The extent of state complicity beyond the security failures — whether senior figures had foreknowledge or involvement — remains unresolved and unresolvable given the destroyed forensic record. TTP/Mehsud attribution has evidential support but was never legally tested.

What Would Change Our Verdict

• Declassified intelligence establishing the full chain of command for the attack
• A successful prosecution of individuals with alleged foreknowledge at senior levels of the Pakistani state
• Forensic analysis of surviving evidence that clarifies the cause of death and planner identity

The FIA's Reopened Investigation and the 'Cooked Up' Allegation

In 2009, Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) reopened aspects of the Bhutto case and moved to implicate not only two Rawalpindi police officers but Pervez Musharraf himself. FIA chief prosecutor Mohammad Azhar Chaudhry went further than the UN Commission had, telling reporters that the government's own initial explanation for the killing — the intercepted call in which Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leader Baitullah Mehsud was said to be congratulating an associate on the killing — was, in his words, 'a cooked up story by Musharraf to mislead the investigators and to save himself.' Bhutto's daughter Aseefa Bhutto Zardari has separately alleged on the record that 'Musharraf ordered crime scene washed & doors locked.'

These are serious allegations from an official investigative body and from Bhutto's own family, and they go further than the UN Commission's more cautious language about a 'failure to protect' the crime scene. But they were never tested at trial: the 2017 Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) verdict convicted the two police officers of negligence and evidence tampering, not of acting on direct orders from Musharraf, and Musharraf never appeared in court to answer the FIA's claim that he fabricated the Mehsud intercept.

Mark Siegel's Testimony and Musharraf's Flat Denial

The most direct first-hand allegation of foreknowledge comes from Mark Siegel, an American political consultant and longtime friend of Bhutto's who was co-writing her book 'Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West' at the time of her death. Siegel has said that in September 2007 he was present when Bhutto received a phone call from Musharraf warning of 'dire consequences' if she returned to Pakistan, and that Bhutto separately sent him an email — to be made public only if she were killed — stating she would hold Musharraf responsible. Siegel later testified to Pakistan's anti-terrorism court, via video link from the United States, that Musharraf was aware of the assassination plot in advance and personally ordered the destruction of evidence.

Musharraf has rejected every part of this account. He has stated flatly, 'I never made a phone call to Benazir Bhutto while she was in the United States,' questioned why Siegel never mentioned the alleged call in his own earlier book about Bhutto, and characterized the accusations as politically motivated. No independent record of the alleged call has surfaced, and the UN Commission's 2010 report — while sharply critical of security and evidence failures — did not corroborate a personal order from Musharraf to destroy evidence. Siegel's account remains an uncorroborated, though repeatedly and consistently made, first-hand claim from a source closely aligned with Bhutto and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).

The Assassination of the Case's Own Lead Prosecutor

Five years into the prosecution, the case took a darker turn. On 3 May 2013, Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali — the FIA's lead prosecutor on the Bhutto case, who was simultaneously handling the 2008 Mumbai attacks investigation — was shot at least thirteen times by gunmen on motorcycles as he drove to a hearing in Rawalpindi; a bystander was killed and his bodyguard wounded. Zulfiqar had reportedly requested additional security from the Interior Ministry because of the case's sensitivity and had been refused. No one was ever charged with his killing, and no group claimed responsibility.

The murder is frequently cited by those suspicious of a cover-up as evidence that someone with the means to intimidate or eliminate investigators had a strong interest in the case not proceeding. That inference is not proof: Pakistan's terrorism prosecutors and investigators have been targeted by militant groups in numerous unrelated cases, and Zulfiqar's parallel role in the Mumbai-attacks prosecution gave a second, entirely separate category of actor a possible motive. The killing remains unsolved, and responsibility cannot be attributed to any specific actor on the current public record.

Scotland Yard's Forensic Conclusion and the Autopsy That Never Happened

Called in by the Musharraf government within weeks of the killing, a Scotland Yard forensic team concluded in a report released 8 February 2008 that Bhutto died from the impact of the bomb blast forcing her head against the escape-hatch lever of her vehicle, not from a bullet. The PPP rejected this conclusion outright: party officials said aides who had prepared Bhutto's body for burial believed they had seen bullet wounds to her head, and the party renewed its call for a full United Nations investigation rather than a British forensic opinion delivered to the same Pakistani government it distrusted.

The dispute could not be settled by autopsy, because Bhutto's family — citing Islamic burial custom and distrust of the process — declined one. That decision, while understandable on religious and emotional grounds, foreclosed the one method that could have resolved the cause-of-death question independent of any government's account, British or Pakistani.

Musharraf and Zardari: Accusations Without Adjudication

Public debate over responsibility has increasingly become a contest between the two men most associated with the case. Bhutto's widower and successor as PPP leader, Asif Ali Zardari, has repeatedly pointed to his wife's own pre-death email naming Musharraf. Musharraf, for his part, said in September 2017 that 'Asif Ali Zardari is responsible for the Bhutto family's demise,' arguing Zardari had the most to gain and asking why, as president for five years afterward, he did not press the investigation harder. Musharraf also pointed to unresolved anomalies — the vehicle's escape hatch, Bhutto's cellphone going missing for two years, and a friend of Zardari's present in the convoy who was never called as a witness and later died in unclear circumstances.

None of these specific claims from either side has been examined by a court or independent commission; they function in public discourse as dueling, evidence-light accusations rather than adjudicated findings. Notably, when asked directly by the BBC in December 2017 whether 'rogue elements' within the military and intelligence establishment could have been involved, Musharraf did not rule it out, saying, 'I don't have any facts available. But my assessment is... a lady who is known to be inclined towards the West is seen suspiciously by those elements' — a striking partial concession from the man most often accused, though he immediately added that the idea he personally ordered her death made him laugh.

The 2017 Verdict's Narrow Scope and Its Aftermath

When the Anti-Terrorism Court finally ruled on 31 August 2017 — nearly eleven years after the killing, after the case had passed through eight different judges — it convicted only former Rawalpindi city police chief Saud Aziz and superintendent Khurram Shahzad, each sentenced to 17 years for negligence and for hosing down the crime scene. Five men alleged to be TTP operatives were acquitted for want of evidence. Musharraf, who had left Pakistan in 2016, was declared a fugitive with a standing arrest order and confiscation of his property; he was never tried on the substantive murder charges.

The verdict satisfied no one associated with the prosecution's original aims. Bhutto's son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, now PPP chairman, called it 'disappointing & unacceptable' and said releasing the accused militants was 'not only unjust but dangerous,' while his sister Aseefa wrote that 'there will be no justice till Pervez Musharraf answers for his crimes.' At a tenth-anniversary rally the following December, Bilawal led supporters in chants branding Musharraf a murderer — a political framing that goes beyond what any court has found, but one rooted in the family's long-standing public position.

What the Record Still Does Not Establish

Taken together, the additional record does not resolve the central question the 2010 UN Commission itself left open: whether Bhutto's death resulted solely from TTP/al-Qaeda-linked militancy, as the government's intercepted-call evidence suggested, or involved foreknowledge or facilitation by elements of the state apparatus, as Siegel's testimony, the FIA's 2009 chargesheet, and Bhutto's own pre-death warnings allege. Both the FIA's 'cooked up story' claim against Musharraf and Musharraf's own countercharges against Zardari illustrate how thoroughly the case has become entangled in Pakistan's factional politics — a dynamic the UN Commission warned would make an 'unfettered search for the truth' difficult, and which the destruction of forensic evidence within the first ninety minutes made close to permanent.