A suicide bomber tried to kill Benazir Bhutto in Karachi by handing her a live human baby encased in plastic explosive.

The former Pakistan Prime Minister, who was killed in a separate explosion two months later, reveals the details of the “baby bomb” in her posthumously published book, Reconciliation, which was released in London and Islamabad on Tuesday.

In her book Benazir tells what happened after she returned to Pakistan last October 18. Around 10 hours after landing in Karachi, the armoured truck in which she was travelling was attacked by two powerful bombs resulting in 179 dead and nearly 600 wounded.

“About 30 minutes before,” Benazir writes, “I saw a man holding up a baby. The baby was dressed in PPP colours and was about one or two years old. The man gesticulated repeatedly to me to take the baby, I gesticulated to the crowd to make way for him. But when the crowd parted, the man would not come forward.”

“The man then went to a policemobile to the left of the truck, which refused to take the baby. As the man tried to hand the baby to the second policemobile, the first policemobile made an announcement, ‘Don’t take the baby, don’t let the baby up on the truck.’

“Both these policemobiles were exactly parallel to where I was sitting in the armoured truck. We suspect the baby’s clothes were lined with plastic explosives. As the man scuffled with the police in the van to hand the baby over, the first explosion took place on the van. Everyone in that van was killed as were those around it. Human flesh, blood and body pieces flew everywhere.

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