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Bhutto's book talks of plot to kill her
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Mon, Feb 04, 2008
The Straits Times
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LONDON - IN AN autobiography being published after her assassination, Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto says she was warned that four suicide bomber squads would try to kill her, one led by Osama bin Laden's 16-year-old son, according to a British newspaper.
The former Pakistan prime minister - killed in Rawalpindi in December while campaigning for elections - wrote that President Pervez Musharraf and a 'foreign Muslim government' had informed her these squads were planning her murder, according to excerpts of the book published in The Sunday Times of London.
The naming of Osama's teenage son, Hamza, could bolster intelligence claims that he is being groomed as a future leader of Al-Qaeda.
He featured in a joint Taleban and Al-Qaeda video shot in 2001 of a militant attack on a Pakistan army camp in South Waziristan, a militant stronghold near the Afghan border.
| In September, reports described him as a senior Al-Qaeda leader who had been waging a jihad in tribal areas along the border.
Ms Bhutto wrote that when she left her children with her husband, Asif Zardari, she was taking a calculated risk in returning to Pakistan.
She says she tried to reassure her children, telling them nothing would happen to her and adding: 'Remember, God gives life, and God takes life. I will be safe until my time is up.'
In the book, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy & the West, which is to be published next week, she reportedly says: 'I was told by both the Musharraf regime and the foreign Muslim government that four suicide bomber squads would attempt to kill me.
'These included, the reports said, the squads sent by the Taleban warlord Baitullah Mehsud; Hamza bin Laden, a son of Osama bin Laden; Red Mosque militants; and a Karachi-based militant group.
'I had actually received from a sympathetic Muslim foreign government the names and cellphone numbers of designated assassins.'
The book also says the suicide bomb attack on her motorcade in Karachi when she returned home in October may have been carried out by a would-be assassin who lined the clothes of a toddler with plastic explosives to turn the child into a bomb, according to the paper.
She claimed that there was a meeting in Lahore where the bomb blasts were planned.
'According to this report, three men belonging to a rival political faction were hired for half a million dollars. They were, according to my sources, named Ejaz, Sajjad and another whose name I forget.'
She says one of those men was possibly the one who gestured her to hold the child, before trying to hand it to police in a nearby van, which exploded soon afterward, the paper says.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
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