Re: Legacy of Zia ul Haq
Mrs. Bhutto's own brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto for nine years, he headed an anti-Zia guerrilla group, which shared offices with the PLO in Kabul, Afghanistan (and later operated out of Damascus, Syria) called Al Zulfikar or "the sword". Its proclaimed mission was to destroy the Zia regime, and the means it used included sabotage, highjackings and assassination in Pakistan. It had demonstrated that it had the capacity to carry out complex international terrorist operations when it hijacked a Pakistan International Airlines Boeing 727 with 100 passenger aboard in 1981, flew it first to Kabul, where it executed one passenger and refueled, and then to Damascus, where, with the assistance of the Syria government, it forced Zia to exchange 55 political prisoners for the passengers. It originally had taken credit for the destruction of Pak One in a phone call to the BBC although subsequently, after it was announced that the American Ambassador was aboard it, Mir Murtaza Bhutto retracted this claim. But Mir Murtaza admitted that he had attempted to assassinate Zia on five previous occasions. And one of these earlier Al-Zulfikar assassination attempts involved attempting to blow Pak One out of the sky with Zia aboard it by firing a Soviet-built SAM 7 missile at it. On that occasion, the missile missed, and when the terrorists who fired it were capture they admitted that they had been trained for the mission in Kabul by Mir Murtaza Bhutto and his advisers. Now, with his sister in a position to win the elections if Zia could be removed, Mir Murtaza had an added reason to pursue his mission. But he was not the only one with a motive.
Zia's great game had also even offended the United States. The Pentagon that the CIA had become concerned that Zia was diverting a large share of the weapons being supplied by America to an extreme fundamentalist Muejadeen group led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Not only was this group anti-American but its strategy appeared to be aimed at dividing the rest of the Afghan resistance so that it could take over in Kabul-- with Zia's support. American anxiety was also increasing over the progress Zia was making in building the first Islamic nuclear bomb. His clandestine effort included attempts to smuggle the Kryton triggering mechanism and other components for it out of the U.S., which had only added to the tensions.
In any case, with Zia death, the U.S. could foresee an amenably alternative: the replacement of the Zia dictatorship, with all its cold war intrigues, with an elected government head by the attractive Harvard-educated Benazir Bhutto. Flying back from the funeral, Secretary of State Schultz recommended that the FBI keep out of the investigation. Even though the FBI had the statutory authority for investigating crashes involving Americans, and its counter-terrorism division had already assembled a team of forensic experts to search for evidence in the crash, it complied with this request.
The U.S. team assigned to Pakistan's Board of Inquiry included only seven air force accident investigators-- and excluded any criminal, counter-terrorist or sabotage experts.
ISI had called off its investigation at the request of the government headed by BB and had transferred the responsibility for it to a civil servant called F.K. Bandial who had been close to ZAB and PPP.
