Benazir’s homecoming rally attacker a free man: Report

Over 140 people died in that attack.

Akhtar,described as a “fugitive” leader of the Taliban-linked Harkat-ul-Jehad Islami group,has been freed by Punjab’s home department,The News daily quoted its sources in security agencies as saying.

He had been kept under house arrest at an undisclosed location in Chishtian sub-division of Punjab since August and was freed in the first week of December,the report said.

Earlier reports had said Akhtar had shifted to the lawless Waziristan tribal region in 2008.

The daily quoted its sources as saying that Akhtar had to abandon Waziristan,his birthplace,after he was wounded in a US drone attack.

He travelled to Peshawar and then to Rawalpindi for treatment,before being arrested and brought to Lahore.

The order for Akhtar’s release was issued ahead of Bhutto’s third death anniversary.

In her posthumous book “Reconciliation: Islam,Democracy and the West,” Bhutto had narrated in detail the suicide attacks targeting her homecoming rally and Akhtar’s alleged involvement in the attack.

She wrote: “I was informed of a meeting that had taken place in Lahore where the bomb blasts were planned.

Three men belonging to a rival political faction were hired for half a million dollars.

However,a bomb maker was needed for the bombs.

Enter Qari Saifullah Akhtar,a wanted terrorist who had tried to overthrow my second government.

“He had been extradited by the United Arab Emirates and was languishing in the Karachi central jail.

The officials in Lahore had turned to Akhtar for help.

His liaison with elements in the government was a radical who was asked to make the bombs and he himself asked for a fatwa making it legitimate to oblige. He got one.

The bomb blasts took place in the army cantonment area in Karachi.”

Subsequently,Akhtar was arrested on February 26,2008 by the regime of former President Pervez Musharraf for questioning in connection with Bhutto’s murder though “many in establishment circles believed that Qari Saifullah had actually been taken into protective custody by his spy masters,” the report said.

Akhtar is “considered a handy tool of the intelligence establishment.

Whenever required,he is used and then dumped by his spy masters,” the report added.

Though Akhtar denied having any role in Bhutto’s murder,he told his interrogators that since his 2007 release,he had been in contact with former ISI chief Lt Gen (retired) Hamid Gul and two former army officers,Maj Gen Zaheerul Islam Abbasi and Brig Mustansar Billa,who had attempted to stage a coup to topple Bhutto’s government in 1995.

Gul was one of three persons named by Bhutto as her possible assassins in a letter written to Musharraf in October 2007. Born in January 1959 in South Waziristan,Akhtar is a graduate of Jamia Binoria in Karachi.

He was also arrested and extradited from the UAE on August 7,2004 on charges of plotting two suicide attacks on Musharraf in Rawalpindi in December 2003.

Instead of trying to prosecute him,security agencies kept him under detention for two years and nine months without filing any criminal charges against him.

This gave credence to reports that he was a “handy tool” of the Pakistani establishment,the report said.