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Bin Laden link to Bhutto death?
03/02/2008 17:07 - (SA)
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 - who was killed in Rawalpindi in December while campaigning for elections - wrote that Pakistan's 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 bin Laden's teenage son, Hamza, could bolster intelligence claims that he is being groomed as a future leader of al-Qaeda. Senior leader
He featured in a joint Taliban 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, he was described in reports as a senior al-Qaeda leader who had been waging a jihad, or holy war, in the lawless tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
"I was told by both the Musharraf regime and the foreign Muslim government that four suicide bomber squads would attempt to kill me," Bhutto reportedly says in the book, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy & the West, which is to be published on February 12.
"These included, the reports said, the squads sent by the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud; Hamza bin Laden, a son of Osama bin Laden; Red Mosque militants; and a Karachi-based militant group," she says in the book, according to the newspaper's excerpts.
- AP
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