Pakistan continues to unravel

From The New York Times:

LAHORE, Pakistan — New details of Benazir Bhutto’s final moments, including indications that her doctors felt pressured to conform to government accounts of her death, fueled the arguments over her assassination on Sunday and added to the pressure on Pakistan’s leaders to accept an international inquiry.

Athar Minallah, a board member of the hospital where Ms. Bhutto was treated, released her medical report along with an open letter showing that her doctors wanted to distance themselves from the government theory that Ms. Bhutto had died by hitting her head on a lever of her car’s sunroof during the attack.

In his letter, Mr. Minallah, who is also a prominent lawyer, said the doctors believed that an autopsy was needed to provide the answers to how she actually died. Their request for one last Thursday was denied by the local police chief.

Pakistani and Western security experts said the government’s insistence that Ms. Bhutto, a former prime minister, was not killed by a bullet was intended to deflect attention from the lack of government security around her. On Sunday, Pakistani newspapers covered their front pages with photographs showing a man apparently pointing a gun at her from just yards away.

Her vehicle came under attack by a gunman and suicide bomber as she left a political rally in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani Army keeps its headquarters, and where the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency has a strong presence.

The government’s explanation, that Ms. Bhutto died after hitting her head as she ducked from the gunfire or was tossed by the force of the suicide blast, has been greeted with disbelief by her supporters, ordinary Pakistanis and medical experts. While some of the mystery could be cleared up by exhuming the body, it is not clear whether Ms. Bhutto’s family would give permission, such is their distrust of the government.

Mr. Minallah distributed the medical report with his open letter to the Pakistani news media and The New York Times. He said the doctor who wrote the report, Mohammad Mussadiq Khan, the principal professor of surgery at the Rawalpindi General Hospital, told him on the night of Ms. Bhutto’s death that she had died of a bullet wound.

Dr. Khan declined through Mr. Minallah to speak with a reporter on the grounds that he was an employee of a government hospital and was fearful of government reprisals if he did not support its version of events.

The medical report, prepared with six other doctors, does not specifically mention a bullet because the actual cause of the head wound was to be left to an autopsy, Mr. Minallah said. The doctors had stressed to him that “without an autopsy it is not at all possible to determine as to what had caused the injury,” he wrote.

But the chief of police in Rawalpindi, Saud Aziz, “did not agree” to the autopsy request by the doctors, Mr. Minallah said in his letter.

A former senior Pakistani police official, Wajahat Latif, who headed the Federal Investigative Agency in the early 1990s, said that in “any case of a suspected murder an autopsy is mandatory.” To waive an autopsy, Mr. Latif said, relatives were required to apply for permission.

At a news conference Sunday, Ms. Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, said he had declined a request for a post-mortem examination. “It was an insult to my wife, an insult to the sister of the nation, an insult to the mother of the nation,” he said. “I know their forensic reports are useless. I refuse to give them her last remains.”

By refusing to do an autopsy the government looked afraid of what one would reveal. By refusing to allow an autopsy Ms. Bhutto's husband, and by extension their whole political party, looks as though they are afraid of what one will reveal.

What both sides have done and are doing is giving each other ammunition to use in a coverup or feed conspiracy theories. Neither of which will do Pakistan any good.

All of this is of serious importance to the United States partly because Pakistan is an ally in the war on terror, but principally because of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Remember this the next time some moonbat starts talking about how Iran has a right to develop nuclear weapons. The kind of people we are afraid might get their hands on Pakistan's bombs already run Iran.