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Bhutto blames Musharraf in pre-death email
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CTV.ca News Staff
Date: Fri. Dec. 28 2007 5:49 PM ET
Benazir Bhutto said in an email that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf should be held responsible for her death, a close friend said Friday.
Mark Siegel, a Washington lobbyist, said he received the email from Bhutto in October, a week after she survived an assassination attempt upon her return to Pakistan.
In the email, Bhutto said Musharraf should be held complicit in her death due to his refusal to meet safety requests she had made.
"Nothing will, god willing, happen," began the email sent to Siegel. "Just wanted you to know that, if it does ... I would hold Musharraf responsible."
Siegel, who co-wrote Bhutto's newest book "Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West," read the email to CTV Newsnet on Friday. He said he had promised to keep the message private until after her death.
On Thursday, a man charged her vehicle as it made its way through a crowd of supporters, shooting at her several times before detonating an explosive device he was wearing.
Siegel said Bhutto sent the email one week after returning to Pakistan on Oct. 18 to run in an election. Her Pakistan Peoples Party was expected to win the majority of Parliamentary seats.
A failed assassination attempt that killed 179 supporters during a celebration to mark her return prompted Bhutto to send him the message, he said.
Bhutto wrote that she had been made to feel insecure by Musharraf's "minions" and had not received the requested improvements to her security.
Siegel said she had been stopped from taking private cars with tinted windows and had not received radio jammers or four police escorts -- as she had requested.
On Newsnet, Siegel read the email, saying, "There is no way what is happening -- in terms of stopping me from taking private cars or using tinted window, or giving jammers or four police mobiles to cover all sides -- could happen without (Musharraf)."
Siegel said her request for four police escorts -- one on each side of her vehicle -- could have saved her life.
"If you saw the pictures from the assassination site yesterday, you would see if she did have those four vehicles on all sides, she would be alive today," he said.
The email was first revealed Thursday by CNN's Wolf Blitzer. Siegel had sent Blitzer the email on Oct. 26, with the condition that he not report on it until after Bhutto's death. No other journalists were sent the email, Siegel said.
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Marc Ouellette
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While the government of Pervez Musharaf vehemently denies any involvement in the murder, and the Ministry of the Interior has produced evidence that an al-Qaeda militant named Baitullah Mehsud was behind the planning and organization of the suicide bombers, and released a transcript of a phone conversation between Mehsud and another operative to 'prove' the al-Qaeda connection, a number of questions remain:
1. Why was Benazir Bhutto's request for additional protection from the Musharaf government fall on deaf ears?
2. How did the Ministry of the Interior 'discover' the communications of Baitullah Mehsud so quickly after the suicide attack? Was the government of Pakistan listening in for some time to Mehsud's conversations? And if so, did they overhear the preparations for the suicide bomber attack?
The implications of these unanswered questions are obvious: Did Pervez Musharaf have advance knowledge that al-Qaeda was planning an attack on Benazir Bhutto, and allowed the attack to occur to prevent Benazir Bhutto from running in the Pakistan elections? Was al-Qaeda an unwitting pawn used by Pervez Musharaf to help eliminate the opposition?
As it stands now, Pervez Musharaf has every reason he needs to suspend or postpone the elections -against the wishes of the United States- and retain his grip on power indefinitely. If anyone stood to benefit from Benazir Bhutto's murder, it's him. However, there are indications that, if such was his plan all along, Musharaf gravely miscalculated the reaction of Pakistan's voters.
Silencing a living opponent is hard enough. But silencing a martyr? That's impossible.