Mark
Twain once said, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is
obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t” and Heraldo Munoz has just
reiterated this fact in his page turner, 'Getting Away with Murder' which discusses the events surrounding his
investigation of the murder of Benazir Bhutto and its historical context. The
U.N commission to investigate the murder of BB was formed to shed light on the
facts and circumstances surrounding the murder, and not to place guilt. Munoz
being a career diplomat and previously a survivor of a dictatorship himself, knew
at once that the public would be expecting them to place guilt on one party or
the other because for people from countries like Pakistan, where the literacy
rates are low, and the political milieu is riddled with uncertainties, the U.N
is either looked upon as a miraculous savior or a conspirator--more so the
latter. Nevertheless he accepted the offer to head the commission.
Munoz
is one of those people who have seen it all. He has been under a death threat,
has earned a doctorate in International studies; has served at various
diplomatic and political positions in the Chilean government post Pinochet and
has also been an ambassador to the U.N from Chile. He is also the author of a couple of other
books, one on the Iraq war and another on life in Chile under the Pinochet
dictatorship.
Munoz’s
book ‘Getting away with murder’ is filled with intriguingly shady information
specifically about events regarding the UN commission’s visit to Islamabad and
generally regarding the murder itself. For instance the role of Mr.Rehman
Malik, who was not only the interior minister of the Govt. of Pakistan and the
point person for the UN commission regarding this case but who also happened to
be the principal security adviser of BB at the time of her assassination.
According to Munoz Mr. Malik was very friendly throughout the investigation but
he would often shy away from important questions that the commission put
forward to him. Moreover in their first meeting with Mr. Malik, the commission
was handed over a detailed report of the investigation that the Pakistani
authorities had carried out till date. Mr. Malik didn’t fail to mention that
the report is quite in depth and the commissioners just need to sign it off
after minor alterations as they deemed necessary which implied that the
commissioners need not get involved in any investigation of their own. This
meeting proves that either the government who had itself initiated the inquiry
had done so just to get the weight of the U.N behind their own investigation or
they were under pressure from the establishment to minimize the role of the
commission. Munoz sums up the general mood of the government towards the
investigation as follows “a few months after the start of our work, we did not
feel as warmly welcomed as we did at the outset”.
The
security of the commissioners had been a cause of concern for the UN Department
of Safety and Security (DSS) from the outset. The commissioners were warned by Pakistani
authorities about a breach in the communication between the Pakistan govt. and
the U.N regarding the first visit of the Commission, just as they were about to
leave for Pakistan but they continued their trip amid recommendations not to
leave the red zone in Islamabad. The commissioners also learned that their cook
was aware of their complete travel itinerary which was an obvious lapse in
security and wasn’t handled satisfactorily. Moreover, despite decoy plans to
visit the crime scene the commissioners were amazed to find the press present
at the scene. All of their trips were marked with information leaks of this
sort. Moreover a suicide attack on the UNWFP office in Pakistan prompted the
DSS to strongly advise the commissioners to postpone their visit, scheduled for
Nov 2009, they obliged but were shocked to read a story in a Pakistani
newspaper about this postponement which clearly had quotes from a letter sent
by the commission to the government of Pakistan. So much so that the
commissioners suspected that the safe house where they stayed i.e. Sindh House
was bugged so they used to have sensitive discussions in the lawn.
Munoz
also points out various loopholes in Mr. Malik’s version of the event on the
day of the murder, as he was seated in the backup vehicle for BB which was
nowhere to be found, before or after the assassination, in various video
footages. Apparently the backup vehicle, a black bulletproof Mercedes Benz, was
the first to leave the parking area and despite the accounts of some of the
passengers of the vehicle, who say they felt the impact of the blast,
surprisingly the backup vehicle travelled all the way back to Zardari House
which was approximately 20-30 minutes away from the crime scene. In Munoz’s
words “They didn’t even stop at a safe distance following the explosion to
check on her condition, the condition of her vehicle, and whether the backup
vehicle was needed”
Lapses
on part of the police were evident both at the time of the assassination and especially
during the investigation including evidence collection and witness questioning.
The police claimed that they had provided a defensive box formation around BB’s
vehicle but that was not the case according to witnesses present and the video
evidence available. Moreover the police claimed that they were surprised to see
BB emerge from the escape hatch on her way out which was negated by the fact
that BB remained standing through the escape hatch when she earlier arrived at
Liaqat Bagh. A scuffle between the police and the PPP workers was also reported
during the procession which might have soured the spirits of the policemen
regarding the performance of their duties. There was also a major lapse in
crowd control by the police which evidently gave the attacker a chance to reach
close enough to BB. After BB’s death was declared by Dr. Mussadiq Khan, he
asked the police chief Saud Aziz for permission to conduct an autopsy, more
than once but was denied. Although the police is forced by law to have an
autopsy report in case of an unnatural death, but they refused to allow an
autopsy on the grounds that they needed to get permission from the family, but
the body was transferred to Chaklala Air base well before Mr.Zardari’s arrival
from Dubai. In addition the crime scene was hosed down within a couple of hours
after the attack which if combined with the aforementioned incompetence on part
of the police, clearly point towards malice.
Musharraf
had evidently been the most important partner of the U.S and U.K in the war on
terror after 9/11 but some quarters in the U.S government had reasons to
believe that he was playing a double game. Additionally his political
legitimacy in Pakistan had started fading. The people of Pakistan had started
feeling the side effects of a dictatorship. Although Washington still
considered Musharraf to be inevitable for their war on terror but they felt the
need to establish some checks and balances through a political player. Nawaz Sharif
the other popular leader of Pakistan was removed from power by Musharraf in a coup
which brought Musharraf to power in 1999, therefore both NS and Musharraf had
personal animosity for each other. BB was the obvious choice. Although BB and
Musharraf had been in touch through various representatives since 2002 but they
never came close to an agreement as Musharraf didn’t have any reason to
compromise but in 2004 Washington started pushing Musharraf to accommodate BB
in the political setup of Pakistan. Subsequently numerous rounds of talks
continued between representatives of both BB and Musharraf. Meanwhile Musharraf
committed some political blunders especially by taking on Chief Justice
Iftikhar Chaudry in the early months of 2007, which resulted in wide spread
protests against his government, these protests were lead by the lawyers, hence
the name Lawyer’s movement, and included the civil society at large. In another
twist of events Musharraf was forced to use force on the notorious clergy of
the Lal Masjid of Islamabad who had been challenging the writ of the state for
almost a year, when Musharraf finally
decided to launch ‘Operation Sunrise’ in July 2007. With the civil society
already disillusioned by his policies, in launching Operation Sunrise,
Musharraf made another enemy in the clergy.
On January24,2007, BB and Musharraf agreed to a road map to the
elections, the details of which would be discussed in the future. In another
meeting in July 2007, after Musharraf’s confrontations with the Chief Justice
and the Lal Masjid, Musharraf iterated that BB not return to Pakistan before
the elections in wake of the various threats to her life reported by the
intelligence agencies. BB knew the threats were real but insisited that
Musharraf provide her with adequate security because she obviously needed to
run a campaign for the elections. As a result of these negotiations Musharraf
signed the NRO on October 5, 2007 and was elected as president on October 6,
2007 where the PPP members abstained from the vote but stayed in the session so
as to fulfill the required quorum. Meanwhile on August 15,2007 BB announced her
return to Pakistan on October 18,2007. After the announcement she began to raise
the issue of her security in international circles. The U.S government advised
BB to hire an international private security firm for her security but
eventually this option was rejected by Musharraf. According to a leaked
Wikileaks cable the U.S government also pushed Musharraf to provide BB with
adequate security. Nevertheless BB wasn’t happy about the role that the U.S
government had played regarding her security arrangements.
The
hurry with which the government approached the situation also raises a few
questions. On December 28,2007 Brigadier General Rtd. Javed Iqbal Cheema, the
spokesman for the ministry of interior gave a press conference in which he
announced that the cause of death of BB was an injury sustained when her head
hit the lever of the escape hatch due to the impact of the blast. He went on to
claim that Baitullah Mehsud was behind the attack. As supporting evidence he
presented an intercept of a conversation between Mehsud and a Maulvi Sahib in
which Mehsud congratulates Maulvi Sahib for doing a “spectacular job”. This
press conference rightfully met with fierce criticism from all quarters,
specially the perfect timing of the intercept made it look too convenient to be
true. The hosing down of the crime scene on the orders of Khurram Shehzad, the
senior most police officer present at the scene, was probably the most
controversial issue in the whole case. Shahzad sites maintenance of public
order as a reason to hose down the site which is at the most, a baseless claim.
He took permission from his senior Saud Aziz who granted permission
immediately. Whether Saud Aziz acted on his own, or whether he was given orders
from someone higher up in the chain of command is still a matter of
controversy. There are however accounts of a phone call from the DG MI to Saud
Aziz, when he was at the hospital. This controversy forced the Punjab
government to set up an inquiry committee just to ascertain the facts
surrounding the hosing down of the crime scene. This committee obviously
absolved the police of this act of criminal negligence by saying that the
hosing down was appropriate as all evidence had been collected by that time. The
RWP police, specifically Saud Aziz continually tried to sabotage the work of
the Joint Investigation Team formed to investigate the murder, by delaying
tactics and misrepresentation of facts.
Munoz
comments on the negligence of the police in the following remarks. “It is my
belief that the police deliberately botched the investigation into Bhutto’s
assassination. Some police officials did not execute their professional duties
as vigorously as they should have, perhaps fearing the involvement in the crime
of powerful actors or intelligence agents”.
The
American intelligence also believed that Mehsud had orchestrated the attack.
The commissioners were not allowed audience to American intelligence officials
when they wanted to determine the basis of this assertion.
Al
Qaida claimed responsibility for the murder in a statement to Asia Times, by
the commander Abu al-Yazid, who claimed that Al Qaida’s second in command Ayman
al-Zawahiri had ordered the attack.
When
the commissioners demanded meetings with the DG ISI and the Army Chief, they
were greeted with a robust no. The commissioners wrote directly to General
Kyani about the issue and after some initial apprehensions they were granted
the meetings. On February 24,2010 the
commission met Lt General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, not much was achieved in the way
of the investigation in this meeting accept the fact that the General
categorically denied the assertion that the ISI had taken the intercepts which
were provided as evidence of Biatullah Mehsud’s involvement. On February 25,
Munoz met with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Here again not much was achieved
in way of the investigation but General Kayani criticized, both the amateur
role of the police and the urgency of the press conference putting the blame on
Mehsud. Both these observations were shared by the commission as well.
Interestingly the very next day the local press carried the news of the meeting
and stated that the security establishment had requested the government to
setup the meeting as they had nothing to hide. In the words of Munoz,” The
public exposure of these meetings fed suspicions held by some observers of
Pakistan about the involvement of the ISI, or at least of some retired officers
or rogue members of the agency, in the assassination of Benazir.”
Munoz
also disperses the theory that BB’s husband AAZ , or someone from within her
close circle of friends and workers might have killed her in the following
words. “Some of the wilder theories imagine that Bhutto family members
including her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, or security aides , like Shahenshah,
were the killers. But these persons were so close to Bhutto that they would
have had numerous and much more propitious and less uncertain occasions to
perpetrate such a hypothetical assassination”.
Munoz
also mentions an interior ministry letter dated October 22,2007, instructing
all provincial governments to provide VVIP level security to former PMs Shaukat
Aziz and Chaudry Shuat Hussain. The fact that the letter did not mention BB who
was also a former PM and who had been attacked only four days before the letter
was issued points towards obvious malice on part of the government.
Benazir’s
murder is exposed for the conundrum that it is, in Munoz’s book. Al Qaida, TTP,
the security establishment, the intelligence agencies, the local police,
Musharraf and his aides and BB’s own security team all played some part in one
way or the other, whether it was the planning and execution of the TTP or the
criminal negligience of the Intelligence agencies and the local police or the
absolutely casual approach of Musharraf and his aides to the repeated demands
for security or the utter sloppiness of BB’s personal security apparatus during
and after the attack. Everyone was responsible for the murder in one way or the
other or as Munoz allegorically puts it. The whole village had killed her. 
