Here’s another piece of the Bhutto assassination puzzle. According to this source, on the day she was killed, Bhutto was scheduled to meet with Arlen Specter and Patrick Kennedy and provide evidence that the ISI was preparing to tamper with the elections.
Bhutto had been due to meet U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to hand over a report charging that the military Inter-Services Intelligence agency was planning to fix the polls in the favor of President Pervez Musharraf.
Safraz Khan Lashari, a member of the Pakistan People’s Party election monitoring unit, said the report was “very sensitive” and that the party wanted to initially share it with trusted American politicians rather than the Bush administration, which is seen here as strongly backing Musharraf.
“It was compiled from sources within the (intelligence) services who were working directly with Benazir Bhutto,” Lashari said, speaking Monday at Bhutto’s house in her ancestral village of Naudero, where her husband and children continued to mourn her death.
…Musharraf has been highly critical of those who allege that his regime is involved in electoral manipulation. “Now when they lose, they’ll have a good rationale: that it is all rigged, it is all fraud,” he said in November. “In Pakistan, the loser always cries.”
…Lashari said the report claimed that U.S. aid money was being used to fix the elections. Ballots stamped in favor of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, which supports Musharraf, were to be produced by the intelligence agencies in about 100 parliamentary constituencies.“They diverted money from aid activities. We had evidence of where they were spending the money,” Lashari said.
Lashari, who formerly taught environmental economics at Britain’s Cranfield University, said the effort was directed at constituencies where the result was likely to be decided by a small margin, so it wouldn’t be obvious.
It’s not clear what has happened to this evidence. Presumably it still exists. But why does Lashari speak of the evidence in the past tense: “we had evidence”? Was the evidence only in Bhutto’s head, or didn’t someone have pieces of paper or other such actual proof? Strange.
I get the impression, convenient as it is for Musharraf and the ISI, that Bhutto’s assassination makes this report moot. But it seems to me that her murder makes these allegations all the more relevant.
