By IANS
London : Terrorists used a baby strapped with bombs in the first assassination attempt on former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto the day she returned home last year after self-imposed exile, Bhutto reveals in her autobiography being published posthumously.
In the book, excerpted in the Sunday Times, she gives a detailed account of the bomb blast that ripped through her motorcade Oct 18 – the day she returned to her homeland from Dubai after eight years in exile.
The first thing she noted was that the jamming equipment provided by President Pervez Musharraf did not seem to be working. The jammers – a key demand of her Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) before her return – could have blocked cell-phone signals that could detonate suicide bombs for 200 metres around her truck.
“Sometime after 11 p.m. I saw a man holding up a baby dressed in the colours of my party, the PPP. He gesticulated repeatedly to me to take the baby, which was about one or two years old. I gesticulated to the crowd to make way for him. But when the crowd parted, the man would not come forward. Instead he tried to hand the baby to someone in the crowd. Worried that the baby would fall and be trampled upon or be lost, I gesticulated no, you bring the baby to me.
“Finally he pointed to the security guard. I asked the security guard to let him up on the truck. However, by the time he reached the truck, I was going down to my compartment in the vehicle’s interior because my feet hurt. We now suspect the baby’s clothes were lined with plastic explosives.”
She said an MP from her party, Agha Siraj Durrani, turned away the man who tried to hand the baby up. The man then went to a police vehicle to the left of the truck, which also refused to take the baby. He then moved to the police vehicle in front of the first. A PPP councillor, Rukhsana Faisal Boloch, was on this vehicle, as was a cameraman.
“As the man tried to hand the baby to the second police vehicle, the first police vehicle warned: ‘Don’t take the baby, don’t take the baby, don’t let the baby up on the truck’.
“Both these police vehicles were exactly parallel to where I was sitting inside the truck. As the man scuffled with the police to hand the baby over, the first explosion took place. Everyone in that police van was killed, as were those around it.
“Within 50 seconds, a 15-kilogram car bomb was detonated, scattering pellets, shrapnel and burning pieces of metal. According to some eyewitnesses, snipers began firing.”
Although Bhutto narrowly escaped being assassinated, 140 people were killed in the bombings.
She was killed in an attack at her public rally Dec 27.
The book is to be published by Simon & Schuster Feb 12.