Twin explosions in Benazir's homecoming parade kill 136

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Jo Johnson and Farhan Bokhari
FT Syndication Service
KARACHI: The Pakistan government blamed Islamist militants for twin explosions that killed more than 136 supporters of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto during her homecoming parade in the early hours of Friday morning.
The attack underscored the turbulence which lay in store for Pakistan ahead of an election due by January, but it was unclear how the assassination attempt might affect a possible power-sharing deal between Ms Bhutto and President Pervez Musharraf.
No-one claimed responsibility, but Ms Bhutto's husband held Pakistan's intelligence agency to blame, while police were investigating whether the attack was connected to al-Qaeda linked militants in tribal regions bordering Afghanistan.
Militants linked to al-Qaeda, angered by the former prime minister's support for the US war on terrorism, had this week threatened to assassinate her, and officials said there were intelligence reports of plots by three separate groups.
"Definitely, it is the work of the militants and terrorists," said Javed Iqbal Cheema, interior ministry spokesman, adding it was too early to say which group was involved.
"The first blast was caused by a hand grenade. The second was the suicide attack," Manzoor Mughal, a senior police official involved in the investigation, said.
Ms Bhutto's husband blamed Pakistan's intelligence agency for the bombs. "We blame the intelligence agency and we demand action against it," Asif Ali Zardari, Ms Bhutto's husband, told a private Pakistani TV news channel. "It is not done by militants, it is done by the intelligence agency."
President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz condemned the blast, but other government ministers have claimed Ms Bhutto brought the attack on herself by seeking a high-profile and agonisingly slow procession that made her a sitting target for militant groups.
The attack is likely to change the nature of Pakistani politics over the next few months, potentially forcing the PPP to rethink its plans to make Ms Bhutto hit the election campaign trail with a series of large rallies across the country.
The PPP's success in bringing out hundreds of thousands of people on to the streets on Thursday had marked a significant shift in the nation's politics, ending an eight year period in which such displays have been virtually absent.
Gawzia Wahab, a PPP parliamentarian travelling in Ms Bhutto's truck when the blasts occurred, said: "Benazir Bhutto is a woman of great resolve. This will not deter her from her political mission. She will continue to fight and continue her campaign."
"Benazir Bhutto obviously can not turn back and I don't think she will," said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a defence and security analyst. "This is a matter of her political survival. But her campaign from now onwards will assume a distinctly different flavour."
Supporters of Ms Bhutto Friday morning vowed to continue what they describe as a fight for democracy in Pakistan, even as hospital accident and emergency staff in the city of Karachi struggled to cope with hundreds of injured people.
"No matter how many die, we're willing to pay the price. Benazir must continue to come out in public. Life and death is in the hands of Allah," said Sait Ali Baloch, who had travelled to Karachi from Kandakot, a town on the border with Baluchistan.
"One thousand dead, no problem," echoed Rukundin, also from Kandakot, as he carried the shattered body of his cousin, Pervez Ahmed, a 30 year old PPP activist and one of three relatives caught up in the blast.
At the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, one of six hospitals to which the dead and injured were taken, Dr Seemin Jamali, head of A&E, said her unit alone was treating 84 people with serious head, abdominal and limb injuries.
"There are 50 dead here alone, including two people who are possibly the suicide bombers," she said. "Two of the bodies were either entwined with each other or very close together when the blasts occurred as they are in very little pieces."
Ms Bhutto and senior leaders of her PPP only narrowly escaped with their lives. Blood stains cover one side of her truck, whose front tyres and cabin windows were blown out by the force of the nearby blast.
The 54-year-old former prime minister has yet to emerge from her Karachi residence, Bilawal House, where she was rushed after the blasts, having been forced to abandon a plan to make her first set-piece speech of the campaign from the Jinnah Mausoleum.
Pedestrians were still picking up body parts strewn across the road leading to the tomb of Pakistan's founder at 11 am on Friday. One PPP worker frantically shouted for an ambulance to relieve him of a baseball cap containing one victim's ear and nose.
Police have yet to say officially whether the blasts were a suicide attack or caused by bombs planted along the procession route. Home minister Aftab Sherpao told Dawn News that the absence of a crater suggested a suicide attack.
The former prime minister was inside her armoured vehicle at the time of the explosions, rather than behind a three-sided glass canopy from which she had earlier been waving to the hundreds of thousands of supporters accompanying her into the city.
Baitullah Mehsud, a militant Islamist leader from Pakistan's tribal belt along the Afghan border, had vowed to welcome her with suicide attacks, a threat she had dismissed earlier on Thursday, saying she feared "no-one but Allah".
The party, founded by her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto -- who was executed by the regime of General Zia ul-Haq, an earlier US-backed military dictator -- had bused supporters in from all four provinces, providing each vehicle with a barrel of biryani by way of morale-boosting sustenance.
Sajjad Hussain, the driver of one bus-load of supporters from the district of Layyah in southern Punjab, said a local doctor, a PPP parliamentary candidate, had paid 75,000 rupees ($1,240, €868, £606) to hire the vehicle for Ms Bhutto's homecoming.