Osama son wanted to kill me: Benazir

By Asif Mehmood
LONDON: In an autobiography being published after her assassination, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto says she was warned that four suicide bomber squads would try to kill her, one led by Osama bin Laden’s 16-year-old son, according to a British newspaper.

Benazir - who was killed in Rawalpindi in December while campaigning for elections - wrote that President Pervez Musharraf and a ‘foreign Muslim government’ had informed her these squads were planning her murder, according to excerpts of the book published in The Sunday Times. The naming of Osama’s teenage son, Hamza, could bolster intelligence claims that he is being groomed as a future leader of Al-Qaeda.

He featured in a joint Taliban and Al-Qaeda video shot in 2001 of a militant attack on an army camp in South Waziristan.

In September, he was described in reports as a senior Al-Qaeda leader who had been waging a jihad, or holy war, in the lawless tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. “I was told by both the Musharraf regime and the foreign Muslim government that four suicide bomber squads would attempt to kill me,” Bhutto reportedly says in the book, ‘Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy & the West’, which is to be published on February 12.

“These included, the reports said, the squads sent by the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud; Hamza bin Laden, a son of Osama bin Laden; Red Mosque militants; and a Karachi-based militant group,” she says in the book.

The book also says the suicide bomb attack on her motorcade in Karachi when she returned home in October may have been carried out by a would-be assassin who lined the clothes of a toddler with plastic explosives to turn the child into a bomb, according to the paper. She says a man gestured her to hold the child, before trying to hand it to police in a nearby van, which exploded soon afterward, the paper says.

She said: “I wrote a letter to Musharraf. I wrote that if I was assassinated by the militants it would be due to their sympathisers in the regime, whom I suspected wanted to eliminate me and remove the threat I posed to their grip on power”. She knew that the same elements of Pakistani society that had colluded to destroy her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and end democracy in Pakistan in 1977 were now arrayed against me for the same purpose exactly 30 years later.
Courtesy: The Nation, Pakistan