Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Conspiracy theories abound. This is the kind of junk that is proliferating in both the Pakistani and Western press. Some of it reminds me of the scene from Jerry Lewis’s Which Way To The Front? where the various members of the American assassination squad describe Hitler’s walk in fundamentally different ways based on their race or backgrounds.

Exhibit A: this is what a Pakistani journalist writes under a pseudonym in the Guardian:

From a respected senior journalist, I was given a first-hand account of the assassination.

“Benazir popped her head out of her armoured car for about two or three seconds, during which a gunmen armed with a 9mm pistol fired three shots from 30 feet away, two of which landed in her neck,” he told me. There was an ongoing discussion at the club’s canteen between eyewitnesses, and the consensus was that anyone that can land so many shots in a frame of a few seconds had to have been trained by the military or the intelligence agencies.

The video has been seen by millions, and the ‘senior journalist’ seems to be in a clash with reality both on counts on time and space. Benazir never ‘poppped her head out’ for ‘two or three seconds’ — she was out of the sun-roof for the whole duration. Secondly, he puts the assassin ’30 feet’ away. As a matter of fact he was standing no more than 10 feet from the target. After misreporting both the time and distance, our pseudo-sleuth then tells us: “the consensus was that anyone that can land so many shots in a frame of a few seconds had to have been trained by the military or the intelligence agencies”. Indeed, anyone who can land two bullets into a human sized target from a distance of 10 feet must indeed require ‘military or intelligence agency’ training. (An even more airy variation holds the assassins haircut as telltale proof of military involvement)

Exhibit B: Here we have Observer’s terrorism expert, Jason Burke, offering novel analysis that lays the blame on PML, except he gets the faction wrong, and instead of PML (Q), he ends up blaming PML (N). One could give him the benefit of the doubt; perhaps he merely mixed up the alphabets. Except, he actually goes on to name Nawaz Sharif and suggests he is not beyond such stiff measures.

Exhibit C: The most surreal explanation comes from the government itself. As I pointed out, the assassin was no more than 10 feet away, so no chance he missed her. The doctor who examined Bhutto spoke of neck and shoulder injuries. Yet, the government now tells us she died of concussion from banging her head against the roof!