US officials have distanced themselves somewhat from the Pakistani government’s swift — perhaps too swift — conclusion that Baitullah was behind the December 27 assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The slain former prime minister’s Pakistan Peoples Party also disputed that claim, pointing the finger instead at figures within the government.
Still, most US experts agree that Baitullah is the most likely culprit. Musharraf told a press conference last Friday that the tribal leader was behind most if not all of the 19 suicide bombings in Pakistan, including the two aimed at Bhutto, in the past three months. “He is the only one who had the capacity,” says one Afghan Taliban with close connections to Mehsud, Al Qaeda and Pakistani militants. (The source, who has proved reliable in the past, would speak only if his identity were protected.) Last week the Pakistani Government produced an intercept in which it claims Baitullah was heard telling a militant cleric after Bhutto’s murder: “Fantastic job. Very brave boys, the ones who killed her.”
The Afghan Taliban source claims that Baitullah and his Qaeda allies had laid out remarkably intricate plans for killing Bhutto, who was a champion of secular democracy and a declared enemy of the jihadists. He says Baitullah and Al Qaeda’s Number 2, Ayman Al-Zawahiri — along with Zawahiri’s deputy, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, Al Qaeda’s new commander of military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan — had dispatched suicide bomber squads to five cities: Karachi, Peshawar, Lahore, Islamabad and Rawalpindi, where she was killed. Their orders were to follow Bhutto with the aim of assassinating her if an opportunity presented itself. (Two US counterterrorism officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing the investigation, say there are growing indications of Baitullah’s involvement in the assassination.) Baitullah and his allies have even grander plans, the Afghan source says. Her assassination is only part of Zawahiri’s long-nurtured plan to destabilise Pakistan and Musharraf’s regime, wage war in Afghanistan, and then destroy democracy in other Islamic countries such as Turkey and Indonesia.
... contd.
