U.S. intelligence claim the suicide bomber in the Benazir Bhutto assassination was there to take out the gunman who actually killed her.:
According to a former high ranking US intelligence official, who wishes to remain anonymous due to the delicate nature of the information, the US intelligence community understands the gunman to have been killed in the blast following Mrs. Bhutto’s assassination.
“He was killed, probably not knowing that the suicide bomber was there,” said this source. “We don’t know for sure if the two men arrived together. We do know that the assassin died in the explosion, and was probably meant to.”
Several other US intelligence officials concur that the bomber was likely "inserted" to “clean up” evidence of the shooting, including eliminating the gunman.
Well, this just adds to the idea that this was in some way a governmental job.
Several questions:
1. Will Scotland Yard’s assist on the assassination investigation come to the same conclusion as an on-the-record finding? If not, how much obstruction will either Musharraf, or somebody in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, throw up?
Answer? Plenty:
“The investigation will be opaque and less effective than what happened in Lebanon,” said Larry Johnson, former CIA officer and Deputy Director for Transportation Security, Antiterrorism Assistance Training, and Special Operations for the office of Counterterrorism in the US State Department.
Others interviewed for this article share Johnson’s skepticism and believe that the Bush administration will likely look the other way should any connection between Musharraf and the assassination be discovered, because, they say, at this point, the US has “no workable solution” and cannot discontinue support for Musharraf, given the options.
“We are being held hostage to Musharraf’s whim,” said one former intelligence official.
And, don’t you think Musharraf knows what Johnson said?
2. Who is behind the hit? Musharraf directly? Musharraf indirectly? Musharraf not having any advance knowledge? Will an anonymous U.S. intelligence source leak any preliminary ideas, at the least, on that?
(That's all for now, folks.)
