Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto Assassinated

To be honest…her assassination does not surprised me.  With the volatile nature of Pakistan her death was imminent.  I was saddened of course, a great woman…coming from a long line of politicians…she seems to complete the circle of her family’s deadly legacy:

 Assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was laid to rest alongside her father in her ancestral home of Garhi-Khuda Baksh after a chaotic funeral procession and scenes of violence in Pakistan on Friday.

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Bhutto’s casket is carried out of Rawalpindi General Hospital by her supporters.

The throngs of her grieving supporters crushed up against the flag-draped coffin, while minor scuffles also broke out.

Violence had earlier erupted in Pakistan in the hours before Bhutto’s funeral started, with at least nine people reported killed and banks, train stations and cars torched.

Bhutto, 54, was killed on Thursday after a public rally in Rawalpindi by the bullets of an assassin who blew himself up after firing the shots, killing at least 28 more people and wounding at least 100 according to GEO-TV.

UPDATE:

…government officials said Friday that a medical report confirmed that Bhutto was killed by shrapnel from the blast — from which at least 28 more people died and at least 100 were wounded.

The shrapnel hit the right side of her skull, Interior Ministry spokesman Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema said. The bomber did shoot at Bhutto with a pistol, but she had no bullet injury.

An Interior Ministry spokesman also told the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan that terrorist group al Qaeda had claimed responsibility for the assassination.

However, that claim has not appeared on radical Islamist Web sites that regularly post such messages from al Qaeda and other militant groups.

The Interior Ministry also told Pakistan’s GEO-TV that the suicide bomber belonged to Lashkar-e-Jhangvi — an al Qaeda-linked Sunni Muslim militant group that the government has blamed for hundreds of killings.

Her father and former prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in the same northern city in 1979.

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I was curious to read and discover what some of my English Sabla members thought about this issue and here are some of their comments:

From Shamsery

Sad , very sad.
Let Allah rest her soul in peace.
presumed it was a suicide attack.Ms Bhutto had just addressed a pre-election rally in the town of Rawalpindi when the bomb went off.
At least 15 other people are reported killed in the attack and several more were injured. Ms Bhutto had twice been the country’s prime minister.
Pakistan is in stake , they will loose the integrity.
Feel shame this politicians

in peace.
presumed it was a suicide attack.

Ms Bhutto had just addressed a pre-election rally in the town of Rawalpindi when the bomb went off.
At least 15 other people are reported killed in the attack and several more were injured. Ms Bhutto had twice been the country’s prime minister.
Pakistan is in stake , they will loose the integrity.
Feel shame this politicians

From Wudjab

Before she was assassinated, I was reading how they had just intercepted an 15 year old boy wearing a suicide vest at the second security perimeter.This gunman apparently went upto the white SUV and shot her several times before blowing himself up.This could not have happened unless there was connivance at the highest levels.

I think this was masterminded by Musharaff in cahoots with Islamic radicals.

The General has spent more time locking up lawyers and civil right activists than the Islamic radicals who are tearing the country apart.

I fear that a civil war is now a real possibility in Pakistan.

I fear that nuclear weapons will ultimately end up with people who will not think twice about using them.

This comment from Mark Steyn just about sums it up perfectly.

Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan had a mad recklessness about it which give today’s events a horrible inevitability. As I always say when I’m asked about her, she was my next-door neighbor for a while – which affects a kind of intimacy, though in fact I knew her only for sidewalk pleasantries. She was beautiful and charming and sophisticated and smart and modern, and everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be – though in practice, as Pakistan’s Prime Minister, she was just another grubby wardheeler from one of the world’s most corrupt political classes.Since her last spell in power, Pakistan has changed, profoundly. Its sovereignty is meaningless in increasingly significant chunks of its territory, and, within the portions Musharraf is just about holding together, to an ever more radicalized generation of young Muslim men Miss Bhutto was entirely unacceptable as the leader of their nation. “Everyone’s an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything,” I wrote last month. “It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate.” The State Department geniuses thought they had it all figured out. They’d arranged a shotgun marriage between the Bhutto and Sharif factions as a “united” “democratic” “movement” and were pushing Musharraf to reach a deal with them. That’s what diplomats do: They find guys in suits and get ’em round a table. But none of those representatives represents the rapidly evolving reality of Pakistan. Miss Bhutto could never have been a viable leader of a post-Musharraf settlement, and the delusion that she could have been sent her to her death. Earlier this year, I had an argument with an old (infidel) boyfriend of Benazir’s, who swatted my concerns aside with the sweeping claim that “the whole of the western world” was behind her. On the streets of Islamabad, that and a dime’ll get you a cup of coffee.

As I said, she was everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be. We should be modest enough to acknowledge when reality conflicts with our illusions. Rest in peace, Benazir.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/pos…Q3MzMzODBmOTg=

Websites:

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/12/28/pakistan.friday/index.html

http://www.englishsabla.com/forum/showthread.php?t=51344