Within hours of former Pakistan Interior Minister Zulfiqar Mirza’s shocking accusation that ex-president Asif Ali Zardari, his friend of 45 years, had been involved in the assassination of not just his brother-in-law Mir Murtaza Bhutto in September 1996, but also his wife and the twice elected prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto in December 2007, the Pakistani media has blanked out all mention of Mirza. Now, with never before seen pictures of the last moments of Murtaza Bhutto in her possession, sent by a Bhutto insider — photographs that Ms. Benazir Bhutto had kept hidden away in her Karachi home — Neena Gopal revisits the circumstances of the Bhutto assassinations. The questions they raise over the double tragedy are many, even if Mr. Zardari's defence will be that he was arrested and indicted for the Murtaza murder but acquitted and released without charge in 2008.
There was no mistaking the striking man striding purposefully across the lobby of the Dubai hotel. There he was, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, the stuff of legend and myth, who along with his brother Shahnawaz had launched the Arab-backed terror group Al Zulfiqar in ’81, convicted in absentia for hijacking a PIA plane and killing a hostage on board. It was October 4, 1993, and Pakistan was only weeks away from a general election that everyone expected former prime minister Benazir Bhutto to sweep as she did in 1988.
The only spoiler? Not the military who backed her removal from office during her first term, but this man right here who had launched his own Pakistan Peoples Party (Shaheed Bhutto). Some said, at the behest of the very forces who had worked to eliminate his father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, hanged in ’79 by military dictator Gen. Zia-ul Haq, and who later died, in a plane crash in ’88; that famously, had the U.S. ambassador on board.
As I ran to catch up with Mir, all kinds of thoughts running through my head, the principal one was the stories doing the rounds that he was planning to end his self-imposed exile in Damascus, head home and claim his place as the true inheritor of his father’s mantle when his nascent party hoped to steal the thunder from the original PPP headed by his sister Benazir.
The buzz was that his mother, the savvy Nusrat Bhutto had summoned him home to rescue the PPP from the clutches of her son-in-law Asif Ali Zardari who had hijacked the party she had led since her husband’s execution, and through the Zia years.
Mir had reached the lift when I managed to collar him. “Aren’t you Murtaza Bhutto,” I called out, and he spun around, quickly took me to one side, looked to see if anyone had overheard, and asked “how do you know who I am.” “Well, you look like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto with hair,” and he roared with laughter and then said ‘no, no, no” when I insisted on an interview, finally relenting and letting me follow him into the apartment in the Galleria that his friend was letting him use.
Dubai was the closest point to Karachi where a party office had functioned for years, and many PPP supporters had already arrived in droves to meet and confer with him. Under pressure from Nusrat, Murtaza’s party, making its electoral debut was fighting far fewer seats than he would have liked. In the interview that followed – which he filmed for some reason – he denied he was going back to Pakistan immediately, or that he sought political office.
But seething, combative, the anger never far from the surface, he lashed out over and over at his brother-in-law Mr. Zardari. Watching the interview, was his other brother-in-law Nasser Hussain who was then married to his younger sister Sanam. Mir debunked reports he had a “handler” from the ISI or the army, and then delivered his parting shot, “You watch, there will be only one man left standing when I go back, it will either be Asif Ali Zardari or me.”
He was going back! But he was also setting the stage for the bitter rivalry that would unfold between the brother and sister, that was to have such tragic consequences. By the end of that October ’93, Murtaza did finally end his 17 year exile and return home to Karachi to a hero’s welcome, on a wave of hope and jubilation among the party ranks. Arrested at his sister, the prime minister’s orders on terrorism charges, he would soon be released on bail and win a seat in the polls – a seat, that Benazir made sure he won.
Less than three years later, on September 20, 1996, he was dead. Two days after he had turned 42. Gunned down in cold blood by the police, after an altercation barely a few metres from the Bhutto home in Karachi, he was left to bleed to death from the bullets to his chest, leg and his gut as his supporters pleaded with police to allow him to be taken to the nearest hospital, the Mideast, a private hospice, walking distance from the shoot-out.
The police said they had their orders. By the time, the new orders came through and he was driven to Mideast in a government car several hours later, Murtaza was gasping for breath, still conscious, bleeding from the mouth and saying repeatedly ‘stop my bleeding.’ He died on the operating table. Rumour has it that the SHO, speculated to have been ordered to execute the hit, was found hanging in the Police Residence quarters, the morning after the killing.
Fingers have always been pointed at Mr. Zardari, particularly by Murtaza’s daughter Fatima, whose chilling account of her conversation with Mr. Zardari and her aunt Benazir Bhutto in the prime minister’s residence in Islamabad in her book (Songs of Blood and Sword), within minutes of the shoot-out, would make anyone’s blood run cold.
Benazir Bhutto had been re-elected to a second term as prime minister but it was Mr. Zardari, seen as the de facto prime minister who called the shots, earning him the sobriquet, Mr. 10 per cent, with speculation rife that Mir’s alleged shaving off of Mr. Zardari’s moustache and his relentless attacks on the government, both in Islamabad and Karachi, as relations between the two families soured, led to the hit; It would ironically, also become the trigger for the PPP-appointed President Farooq Leghari to force Ms Bhutto to step down.
What is Mirza not telling us?
On Tuesday, the spectre of Mir Murtaza Bhutto came back to haunt Mr. Zardari as one of his closest friends Zulfiqar Mirza all but accused him of killing not just Benazir, but also Murtaza Bhutto. Suddenly that interview Mir gave me in 1993, and that one-liner ‘there will only be one person standing…” seemed like yesterday.
Not surprisingly in a Pakistan where there is always something more than meets the eye, the press conference that a powerful former interior minister in ex-president Zardari’s government held in Karachi last Thursday (May 28), which went out live on all the news channels, was blanked out by the mainstream media. No newspaper carried Mr. Mirza’s accusations the next day. The only news portal to carry the story, took it off the site the next morning.
Coming as it does on the heels of the hounding of Axact, a company whose directors under sister company Labbaik, were all set to launch independent media channel Bol next month, helmed by investigative journalist Kamran Khan – the company is accused of selling fake degrees – the silencing of the media that cannot be fully controlled, is now out in the open.
No surprises then that Pakistan is rife with reports that Mr. Zardari prevailed on the government of the day to silence a key member of his coterie. Mr. Mirza’s other charge – after his security was withdrawn - is that should anything happen to him, the person who should be questioned is Ms Faryal Talpur, Mr. Zardari’s sister whose running feud with Nusrat and Benazir was an open secret. More embarrassingly, Mr. Mirza accused a top model named Ayyan Ali, arrested for carrying cash worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to Dubai, of laundering money for Mr. Zardari.
Clearly, much like Mr. Mirza’s accusations of former President Zardari’s involvement in the double Bhutto assassinations – eleven years apart - there’s no clinching proof either way that any of this is true. If there was any evidence, it is long gone, the murderous fingerprints washed away, when police hosed down both sites, within hours of the killings, and the systematic elimination of anyone seen as close to either hit.
Why Mr. Mirza chose to make these accusations at this juncture are far from clear. Was there a falling out between the two old friends and business partners? With no election in sight, this cannot be a move to discredit Zardari who lost the 2013 polls quite decisively. There is some speculation that Mr. Mirza is playing to the PPP’s old guard, angered over the manner in which Mr. Zardari has empowered his own sister and nephews, sidelining the stalwarts who had stood by Benazir through the party’s worst times. One faction broke away last month.
But the group that says it does not trust Mr. Zardari has much the same thing to say about Mr. Mirza, who together with others close to Mr. Zardari had taken control of the party. Again, Mr. Mirza could be trying to get Mr. Zardari’s son and future hope, Bilawal Bhutto’s attention. The young man has been persuaded - many say unwisely - to return to Pakistan and run the party. Unconfirmed reports say, he is being treated for clinical depression and is deeply unhappy, knowing that his father only needs him to flaunt the Bhutto name, which has some currency within Sindh province, but no longer has the pan-Pakistani support it once enjoyed. Sceptics say massive rigging did the trick in 2013. It may not work again.
Questions over what Mr. Mirza hopes to achieve were made more intriguing, when, a day after he went public with his accusations, his wife and the first woman Speaker of an Assembly in an Islamic country, Fahmida Mirza told me that the remarks had “been twisted, and taken completely out of context”, making one wonder whether Mr. Mirza was under pressure to retract his charges.
Who killed Murtaza Bhutto? Who killed Benazir? Will we ever know? What does Zulfiqar Mirza know that he is not telling us?
The untold story
Heightening the sense of intrigue and backroom manoeuvres, an insider sent me photographs that were in the possession of Benazir Bhutto, and have never been made public thus far. The pictures are of the last moments of Ms Bhutto’s brother Mir Murtaza Bhutto’s life as he lay on the crossroads near 70, Clifton, the Bhutto home in Karachi, alongside his slain bodyguards and supporters, their clothes covered in blood, with armed police who had just shot them, in a police encounter, looking on.
Police reports at the time said, that Mir had been waved down by a police party as he was returning home from a political rally and had jumped out of his car and confronted the police, challenging them to shoot him; Which they did, at close range. Mir’s party supporters insist even today that their leader was not a felon, and shooting him when he was not even trying to escape reinforces the charge that it was a ‘hit’.
Eyewitnesses at the scene say the police cordoned off the area for almost three hours, refusing to allow anyone to go in or out, stopping Murtaza's wife Ghinva and his daughter Fathima, then 11, from coming out of their home, and threatening anyone who arrived on the scene, saying they would be shot if they tried to move him. In the pictures, Mir is just outside the frame. It’s only the last photograph that shows him on a hospital gurney, bleeding from the mouth and the frontal bullets that he took to his neck, chest, abdomen and leg.
Mir was taken to hospital only after his life had all but ebbed away, dying on the operating table that night, his daughter Fathima, then barely 11, and his second wife Ghinwa, left distraught, knowing they could do nothing.
As for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007, the questions over her own personal bodyguard, Khalid Shehnshah, signalling to someone repeatedly, to cut Bibi’s throat, and why and how he died, a day after those pictures went viral, remain. The official version is that she was killed by a suicide bomber from the Tehrik Taliban Pakistan. The unofficial version is that she was not.
Neena Gopal is Resident Editor, Deccan Chronicle, Bangalore
