Benazir Bhutto Assassinated: Chaos Erupts
The opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was buried at her ancestral village in southern Pakistan on Friday as riots that began after her assassination on Thursday continued across the country, leaving 23 people dead, including four security officers.
The government laid the blame for the combined shooting and suicide bomb attack on a militant with ties to Al Qaeda, and ordered the army deployed to Ms. Bhutto's home province of Sindh, where the worst violence occurred, including parts of the city of Karachi, as the protests descended into criminality and banks were ransacked, train carriages and cars set on fire, and shops looted and burned.
The government ordered an almost complete shutdown of services to try to prevent the violence from spreading. Officials suspended train services between Karachi and the Punjab province to the east, and most domestic flights were canceled. Gas stations across the country were closed, making it virtually impossible to make a journey by car any great distance. Roads were closed around the city centers where trouble was anticipated, and television and Internet services were down or only sporadic in most cities. With many Bhutto supporters openly blaming the government for the assassination, the Interior Ministry made the surprising announcement that Ms. Bhutto had died not from gunshots or shrapnel but from a skull fracture when she was thrown by the force of the suicide attack and hit her head on a lever of the car sun roof. Two high-level inquiries are being conducted into her death: one headed by the senior judiciary and one by high-level police and intelligence officials, said Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry.
Editor’s Note: The Pakistani blogsphere is not ready to beatify Benazir Bhutto into the Pakistani Aung San Suu Kyi like many in the West have done. But whether they supported her politics or not, they regard her assassination as a big step backward reports NAM contributor Ketaki Gokhale.
The frenzy over the assassination of Pakistani opposition party leader Benazir Bhutto has spilled over into the blogosphere, where emotions mirror the rising tides of violence in Lahore, Karachi and Rawalpindi, but are tempered with a strong dose of pragmatism.
AP | ASHRAF KHAN | December 28, 2007 02:20 PM