Benazir Bhutto murder Case: ''Blood and secrets''

The brutal gunning down on Friday of Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, the FIA’s special public prosecutor and the man investigating the December 2007 Benazir Bhutto murder case, was indeed well planned and premeditated. The unidentified gunmen who pumped bullets into his body as he left his home in Islamabad obviously intended to kill him. Chaudhry was to appear before an Islamabad anti-terrorism court in the Benazir murder case on the same day. We will now never know what he intended to say but we can be certain that he died because he was supposed to say something which drove his scared murderers, and the people behind them, into panic. Chaudhry’s murder adds a new twist to the case which remains unsolved more than five years after the most popular politician of the country was assassinated at Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh through a huge blast and with bullets. A while back we saw a similar murder of Khalid Shahenshah in Clifton Karachi. Shahenshah was BB’s main security guard. It is astonishing that a government led by the party Benazir Bhutto headed made such limited efforts to discover what really happened, apart from making grand and expensive but purposeless moves like the so-called UN inquiry which led to nothing – and this nothing was, for whatever reasons, perhaps the goal. This lack of action has almost ensured that Benazir’s murder may join the long list of mysteries that our political history is replete with. The assassination of Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali may make it all the more likely that this will be the case. This incident is no doubt a personal tragedy for the victim’s family and also for that of the female passerby who also died during the incident. But this death also goes beyond the personal and adds a new chapter to our history of many secrets seeped in blood. There are clearly persons who do not want the truth in this case to ever surface and wish to intimidate – even eliminate – those who are pursuing the case. It would be highly unfortunate for us as a nation if such elements managed to thwart meaningful progress in this and other affairs the secrecy around which they must find vital for their survival. The more things remain hidden, the more dangerous the state of our affairs becomes – with even greater risks lying ahead. The Benazir case must not get bogged down in the heinous murder of Chaudhry Zulfiqar.