In A new twist to last month’s Karachi bombings, which claimed nearly 140 lives, former Pakistan premier Benazir Bhutto has said that a “child suicide bomber” followed by a car bomb might have been used in an attempt to assassinate her.

“Although it remains difficult to know for certain, I doubt that a suicide bomber was involved in the attack on me. I suspect, after talking to some of the injured, that the terrorists used a ‘small child’ as a ploy to get to me,” Bhutto wrote in a commentary for CNN. “They were trying to hoist the child — dressed in the colours of my party’s flag — onto my truck,” Bhutto said, adding failing to do so they dropped the child near her vehicle.

“Some witnesses said the child had been rigged as a human bomb. I’m not sure. What followed was a massive explosion, killing scores immediately, tearing many bodies in half and sending blood, gore and flames up into the vehicle,” she said.

“In less than a minute a second bomb — reports later suggested a car bomb — went off,” she wrote.

Bhutto survived unhurt when the blasts took place near her armoured truck in a huge procession she led in Karachi on October 18 for the first time in eight years.

Questioning as to why the investigation were initially given to a police officer who was present when her husband was nearly tortured to death in 1999, she said the most worrying was the “adamant rejection by Islamabad of any assistance from the state-of-art forensic teams from FBI and Scotland Yard.

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