Bhutto slaying spawns conspiracy theories galore

By Simon Cameron-Moore

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - In Pakistan's Kafkaesque world, conspiracy theories are given far more credence than the official accounts of Benazir Bhutto's assassination.

"Our history is full of such assassinations and all have been done by invisible hands, agencies," said Aqueel-ur-Rehman, manager of a filling station in Peshawar.

"Thinking about anybody else would be foolish."

President Pervez Musharraf's government has made al Qaeda its prime suspect in the killing of an opposition leader who stood a real chance of becoming prime minister for a third time after a January 8 election, now likely to be delayed.

Al Qaeda and its allies among Pakistani jihadi groups certainly wanted Bhutto dead.

Like Musharraf, she was seen as a U.S. ally and was one of the strongest moderate voices seeking to wrest back influence in the Islamic world from Osama bin Laden and his ilk.

Even so, ordinary Pakistanis are more willing to believe she was killed by political enemies close to Musharraf, rogue elements in the establishment, intelligence agencies, and even the United States though it had backed her return from exile.

SMOKESCREEN

The government says Bhutto died when she cracked her skull on a sunroof handle during a gun and suicide bomb attack last Thursday, though television pictures show her hair and veil lifting as a clean-shaven gunman nears her car and fires.

The government account provoked widespread disbelief.

Shireen Mazari, the head of an Islamabad think-tank, regarded the Interior Ministry's explanation as an "extreme absurdity".

"The television showed what was happening. Everything was in black and white, I don't know what they were trying to do," said Mazari, director-general of the Institute of Strategic Studies.

Most people wrote off the official version as a clumsy attempt to divert attention from security lapses.

"People believe that the lapses were deliberate so that the assassins could get close to her and kill her," said Hamid Gul, a retired general who served as head of the military's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) during Bhutto's first government.

Gul's own name surfaced among theorists' lists of possible plotters against Bhutto because of a past sympathy with Islamist causes, but he described that as "bunkum".