‘If assassination is the price I pay ...’

‘If assassination is the price I must pay ...’

24 October 2007

An eyewitness report of the bombing of Benazir Bhutto’s bus

We had been on the bus for about eight and a half hours when Bhutto came and sat on a chair for a while to rest her swollen feet. On her shoulder was perched a speckled dove with an injured foot. It had fallen on the bus when someone released a clutch of white doves into the air. She then went downstairs to the armoured compartment to meet with a woman MP who had just boarded. After that, she and her secretary worked on the speech she was due to give when we finally reached the Jinnah memorial, our destination.

We never did. At six minutes past midnight there was a low boom and a flash of orange flame lit up the sky. The bus rocked with the explosion, sending us all to the floor. Within perhaps a minute, a second much larger explosion followed. All around us, trees and vans were on fire and the whole sky seemed lit up. After a moment’s silence, the screams started, then the sirens. Surprised to still be alive and unhurt, I knew we had to get off the bus before its fuel tank caught fire. Some jumped over the side, others like me down a chute at the back, where we were caught. Bhutto herself had already been whisked out and away to her house, though she told me later she had been afraid to go back there, fearing her assassins would be waiting there to finish her off.

Back at her house, Bhutto and we other survivors of the bus sat around dazed, hugging each other and crying as on the television the death toll went up and up. Her plans for a triumphant road procession to her ancestral home in rural Sindh and then round the country were in tatters, and in retrospect seemed naive in the extreme in a nation where bombings are an almost daily occurrence.

The house was lit up by coloured lights for a joyful homecoming. Instead, there was the terrible realisation that far from bringing people together and avoiding bloodshed, her return had provoked it.