RAWALPINDI, Dec 29: As Pakistan passed the second day on Saturday of mourning and often violent protests over Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, the site of the gun-and-bomb attack on the former prime minister in Rawalpindi seemed becoming a virtual shrine where thoughts whirled, as everywhere else, about who and what actually killed her.
“It is here she was shot,” one visitor to the site told several others in a group of people assembled outside a gate of Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh park where the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader faced what was officially claimed a suicide attack possibly directed by Al Qaeda after she had addressed a big election rally on Thursday.
“Now they say it was not a bullet that killed her,” said another visitor to the site when this correspondent was there late on Saturday afternoon.
“They are talking rubbish,” said a third man in the group, apparently agitated by an interior ministry statement that Ms Bhutto’s death was caused by an injury from an iron lever of the sun-roof of her bullet-proof jeep rather than a bullet fired by the unidentified bomber.
“The lever could have hit while she stood up (to appear from the sun-roof) and not while going to sit (back into her seat),” he remarked.
The group scouring the blood-stained site a the time seemed to be ordinary people, or PPP sympathisers, but not party activists many of whom were reported to have moved their protests to other parts of the city after holding a “ghaibana” (in absentia) funeral prayers congregation at the park for their leader, whose death has sparked an intense nationwide outpouring of grief and anger marked by violence in many cities.
The interior ministry version given by a spokesman on Friday and rejected by the PPP as “a pack of lies”, fuelled an already raging controversy over whether it was one or two bullets or a bomb that killed Ms Bhutto, or that the deadly gunshots came from somewhere else, who was actually behind the assassination, whether it was one or two attackers, and whether the government failed to provide her adequate security.
These aspects of the incident are asked everywhere, in offices, homes, tea shops and political circles.
While earlier reports from authorities and witnesses suggested it was only one attacker who fired gunshots before blowing himself up with a bomb strapped to his body.
But the DawnNews television aired on Saturday night an exclusive footage from an amateur photographer showing a young man shooting at Ms Bhutto while another man wrapped in a white sheet of cloth and thought to be the bomber stood behind him.
Civilian workers at the Liaquat Bagh, who did not allow visitors into the park, said municipal fire engines had washed down a part of what is called Liaquat Road on Thursday night to clear it of blood of 21 other people killed and about 60 wounded by the bomb blast, thus removing what could possibly have contained some vital pieces of evidence.
“What investigation (scope left) when everything has been erased,” said one visitor.
But despite the washing by fire-brigade hoses, a dark patch caused by pools of blood as well as blood stains on electric poles and walls on both sides of the road were still visible.
Even the chin of PML-N leader Makhdoom Javed Hashmi on one of his campaign posters for a National Assembly seat for the Jan 8 elections was smeared with the blood of some bombing victim.
Park workers said people had been regularly coming there from the day of the attack to examine the site.
“We have come to see the place out of love for her,” said an old man sporting a white beard.
There were also questions being asked everywhere about why no post-mortem examination of Ms Bhutto was carried out at the Rawalpindi General Hospital where doctors said all their efforts to revive her after she was brought there had failed.
The government said a post-mortem was not done in deference to wishes of her husband Asif Ali Zardari and that it could be done even now if the family wanted.
“She was one man’s wife but property of 160 million people (of Pakistan),” said a PPP sympathiser.
