Masses Mourn Bhutto as Unrest Spreads

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The Bhutto Assassination -- A First Person Account

John Moore, a photographer for Getty Images, was at the Rawalpindi rally where former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto was killed on Dec. 27. His photos provide a compelling, first-person account of the day's tragic events.

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That explanation was hotly disputed by Bhutto's allies, who said it tended to excuse what they called abysmally inadequate security for Bhutto. They said she had been killed in a well-coordinated strike by people who knew what they were doing.

"It was a targeted, planned killing," said Babar Awan, a top official in Bhutto's party and a criminal lawyer. Awan said that he had seen Bhutto's body and that she had two clearly defined bullet wounds -- with entry and exit points. He said he believed there had been more than one gunman because the bullets -- one striking the top of the head and the other the neck -- had come in from completely different angles.

Bhutto was buried without an autopsy, and the scene of the attack was almost immediately hosed down, before any forensic examination could be carried out. As a result, the exact circumstances of Bhutto's death are likely to remain a mystery, another in a long line for Pakistan.

Bhutto had just finished addressing a campaign rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi on Thursday when she climbed into her bulletproof sport-utility vehicle, which began to pull away. As she left, she put her head out through the sunroof and started waving to the crowd. Witnesses reported hearing three to five shots, then seeing Bhutto fall back into the vehicle.

Seconds later, they said, a suicide bomber detonated his charge near the vehicle. Some witnesses reported that the gunman and the bomber were the same person and that he set off the explosives as he was being tackled by Bhutto's security guards. Officials said the blast killed more than 20 people.

People who had been aides to Bhutto also reacted skeptically to government officials' claims that they had cracked the case and that Islamic extremists were responsible. "We reject the government's version. It seems to be an attempt to protect the real culprits," said party spokesman Farhatullah Babar. He did not elaborate.

After her homecoming procession was attacked in October, Bhutto said she believed that people associated with "the establishment" -- code in Pakistan for the military and the intelligence services -- had been behind that strike. She also blamed Musharraf's political allies, who she said were desperate to keep her out of power.

Those beliefs were starkly evident in Bhutto's home province of Sindh on Friday. In cities including Karachi and Hyderabad, pro-Bhutto rioters ran through the streets, attacking buildings with even a tangential connection to the government and sending thick plumes of smoke into the sky. The government deployed paramilitary forces, and by Friday night a tense calm prevailed in many areas.

In Bhutto's ancestral home of Larkana, an impoverished agricultural region in northern Sindh, protesters spent Thursday night trashing the downtown shopping district, leaving residents to pick up the pieces Friday.

"This damages our own people," said Ali Hasan Pirzada, 25, whose cellphone shop was devastated in the rioting. "Benazir Bhutto would not have supported such a thing." Pirzada said Musharraf's government had failed in its duty to provide security and "should resign and hand over power to the people."

That sentiment was echoed repeatedly several miles away at the Bhutto family tomb, where the woman who had headed Pakistan's most famous political dynasty for nearly three decades was laid to rest.

The crowd was awash in red, green and black -- the colors of the Pakistan People's Party. The coffin was wrapped in a PPP banner. On a day devoted to honoring the life of the former two-term prime minister of Pakistan, there was hardly a Pakistani flag to be seen. No government figures or government security forces were present.