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Musharraf: Bhutto is to blame
06/01/2008 09:30 - (SA)
Washington - Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf told US television on Saturday that slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto alone bears the blame for the attack that killed her and many of her supporters last month, and rejected government culpability.
"For standing up outside the car, I think it was she to blame alone. Nobody else. Responsibility is hers," he told CBS television in a broadcast on Sunday, in a partial transcript of the interview.
Bhutto, Musharraf's chief political rival and leader of the opposition Pakistan People's Party (PNP), was murdered as she left a campaign rally on December 27 ahead of elections which were to have been held this month.
She was killed in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi while standing in a moving car with her head through the roof hatch.
No autopsy
Pakistan's interior ministry has said Bhutto died from a head injury sustained when a suicide bomber blew himself up near her car, saying the force of the blast caused her to hit her head on the car's roof hatch.
But party aides who were with her at the time of the attack say she died from a gunshot to the head. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, refused to allow an autopsy before she was buried.
Weighing in on the controversy on Saturday, Musharraf told the CBS programme 60 Minutes that a gunshot could, in fact, have been the cause of Bhutto's fatal injuries.
Asked if Bhutto might have been shot, Musharraf answered: "Yes, absolutely, yes."
He added that his government did everything possible to protect Bhutto, in the face of death threats she had received.
"You have to remember: She had the threat. So she was given more security than any other person," the Pakistan president said.
His comments came as British anti-terrorism police on Saturday started examining evidence in Bhutto's assassination, after being asked by Musharraf to assist in the investigation.
Meanwhile the national elections which were to have been held on January 8, now have been pushed back until February 18.
- AFP
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