New Tape Seems To Show Bhutto WAS Shot

By Cernig

CNN today has a video of the death of Benazir Bhutto which shows her scarf tugged, as if by an invisible hand, as shots rang out just before a suicide bomb detonated. The video suggests that at least one bullet passed very close or struck her a glancing blow.

Meanwhile, the NY Times confirms reports in the Indian Press two days ago ( which we blogged here) which said that the hospital report did not make any mention of the already-infamous Sunroof Lever of Doom.

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.

...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.

It was Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who refused an autopsy, citing mistrust of whether any government findings would be truthful. He certainly seems to have had good reason for that, given the way the government have spun everything surrounding the incident down to even the cause of death and, more importantly, who was responsible.