Bhutto sent Musharraf a letter naming three who should be investigated in case she were assassinated
The NYTimes reported today that “Ms. Bhutto has long accused parts of the government, namely the country’s premier military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, of working against her and her party because they oppose her liberal, secular agenda. In a letter she sent to Mr. Musharraf just before her return to Pakistan in October, she listed ‘three individuals and more’ who should be investigated for their sympathies with the militants in case she was assassinated. An aide close to Ms. Bhutto said that one of those named in the letter was Ijaz Shah, the director general of the Intelligence Bureau, another of the country’s intelligence agencies, and a close associate of Mr. Musharraf’s. The second official was the head of the country’s National Accountability Bureau, which had investigated Ms. Bhutto on corruption charges. The third was a former official in Punjab Province who had mistreated her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, when he was in jail awaiting trial on corruption charges”. This NYTimes story is published here.
Filed under: Pakistan
This is a nice read:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n24/ali_01_.html
It is mentioned in this article:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3291600.ece
Yes, Tareq Ali’s piece in LRB is a very nice read indeed — with these most memorable lines: “In 1968, when a right-wing, pro-military rag in Lahore published an attack on me, it revealed that I ‘had attended sex orgies in a French country house organised by [my] friend, the Jew Cohn-Bendit. All the fifty women in the swimming-pool were Jewish.’ Alas, this was totally false, but my parents were amazed at the number of people who congratulated them on my virility…”
Robert FIsk’s piece in The Independent reminds me that I read something in the blur of coverage the past few days reporting that Benazir had come back at some point from a visit to North Korea with nuclear plans or blueprints or whatever that were useful to the development of Pakistan’s nuclear program — which the Pakistani government has little embarassment about, although it quite circumspectly declined to declare Pakistan a nuclear power, as India did after its 1998 nuclear tests…
In an interview two years ago for a documentary produced by The New York Times and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she said she also did not know, when in office, that A. Q. Khan, the head of the Pakistani nuclear program, was selling nuclear technology to other states, including Libya and North Korea. But according to accounts given by Dr. Khan’s associates, Ms. Bhutto, after visits to North Korea in the 1990s, returned to Islamabad with North Korean missile designs intended to be mated to the Pakistani bomb.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/world/asia/28bhutto.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=todayspaper
Great! Thanks!
China Hand has been doing a fantastic job on Pakistani politics on Chinamatters blogspot — not missing Nawaz Sharif’s bragging about his contribution to the nuclear program — and on 17 December, in “Pakistan’s Elections — It’s all over but the squealing…about vote-counting, that is”, reported that Nawaz said: “India made five nuclear explosions, in response, Pakistan made six atomic explosions, he told the gathering.
Got that? India 5, Pakistan 6. Pakistan wins!”