By Muhammad Najeeb, IANS
Islamabad : Former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto may have died of a severe head injury when she hit the roof escape hatch of her Land Cruiser while ducking after the terror attack, the Scotland Yard team has said in its probe report released Friday.
“Given the severity of the injury to Bhutto’s head, the prospect that she inadvertently hit her head whilst ducking down into the vehicle can be excluded as a reasonable possibility,” said the investigation report released by the British high commission.
The Scotland Yard team was in Pakistan for more than two weeks to investigate Bhutto’s assassination in a gun and bomb attack minutes after addressing an election rally in the garrison town of Rawalpindi Dec 27.
The findings were presented to interim Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz by Detective Superintendent John MacBrayne Friday afternoon.
The probe team consulted Britain’s Home Office pathologist Nathaniel Cary, who said she died as a result of a severe head injury sustained as a consequence of the blast and due to head impact “somewhere in the escape hatch of the vehicle”.
Cary says in the report: “The only tenable cause for the rapidly fatal head injury in this case is that it occurred as the result of impact due to the effects of the bomb blast.”
According to the report, the roof escape hatch has frequently been referred to as a sunroof — which is not.
“It is designed and intended to be used solely as a means of escape. It has a solid lip with a depth of 9 cm and Bhutto’s injury is entirely consistent with her head impacting upon the lip of the escape hatch.”
The report argues that Bhutto’s head did not completely disappear from view until 0.6 seconds before the blast. She can be seen moving forward and to the right as she ducked down into the vehicle.
While her exact head position at the time of the detonation can never be ascertained, the overwhelming conclusion must be that she did not succeed in getting her head entirely below the lip of the escape hatch when the explosion occurred.
The report also dismisses the government’s earlier claim that two or more people were involved in the attack, saying that only one person was responsible.
“All the available evidence points toward the person who fired shots and the person who detonated the explosives being one and the same person.
“Considerable reliance has been placed upon the x-rays taken at Rawalpindi General Hospital following Bhutto’s death. Given their importance, the x-rays have been independently verified as being of Bhutto by comparison with her dental x-rays. Additionally, a valuable insight was gained from the accounts given by the medical staff involved in her treatment, and from those members of Bhutto’s family who washed her body before burial,” said the report.
The only apparent injury was a major trauma to the right side of the head, which the experts exclude as being an entry or exit wound as a result of a gunshot. The report adds that the possibility of a bullet wound to her mid or lower trunk can reasonably be excluded.
However, the limited x-ray material, the absence of a full post mortem examination and CT scan have meant that the pathologist was unable to categorically exclude the possibility of there being a gunshot wound to the upper trunk or neck.
When his findings are put alongside the accounts of those who had close contact with Bhutto’s body, the available evidence suggests that there was no gunshot injury, the report states.
The Pakistan government had said a day after her murder that she had died after hitting her head with the lever of her bomb proof Land Cruiser. But later President Pervez Musharraf had later asked people to ignore the statement.
“Some officials have given some statements which have created confusion,” he said, and invited Scotland Yard for investigations.
According to the report, it was agreed after discussions between British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Musharraf that officers from the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command (SO15) should support the investigation into Bhutto’s death.
The primary focus of the Scotland Yard team was to assist the Pakistani authorities in establishing the cause and circumstances of Bhutto’s death. The wider investigation to establish culpability has remained entirely a matter for the Pakistani authorities.