Assassination of Benazir Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan and leader of the opposition Pakistan People's Party (PPP), was killed on 27 December 2007 in Rawalpindi after addressing a campaign rally at Liaquat National Bagh ahead of elections scheduled for January 2008. Witnesses and video footage indicated an assailant fired shots at her as she stood through the sunroof of her vehicle, followed immediately by a suicide bomb blast beside the vehicle. Twenty-three other people were killed by the bombing. Bhutto was taken to Rawalpindi General Hospital, where doctors attempted resuscitation before she was declared dead at 18:16 local time. This came two months after she survived a separate suicide bombing attack in Karachi on 18 October 2007, upon her return from years of self-imposed exile, which killed at least 139 people.

The precise cause of Bhutto's death became the subject of significant dispute. Pakistani officials initially cited gunshot wounds, then said she died from a skull fracture sustained when the force of the blast threw her head against the vehicle's sunroof, a version her aides and party rejected as false. No formal autopsy was performed before her burial; her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, declined to authorize one. A subsequent UN Commission of Inquiry found that Pakistani police had hosed down the crime scene shortly after the attack and failed to properly collect evidence, actions the Commission said went "beyond mere incompetence." Scotland Yard investigators later concluded she died from head trauma caused by the bomb blast rather than a gunshot, though this finding was reached without autopsy evidence.

The UN Commission, headed by Chilean diplomat Heraldo Muñoz, concluded that security measures provided to Bhutto by federal, provincial, and local police were "fatally insufficient and ineffective," and that police failed to clear the rally route, coordinate with PPP security, or protect her vehicle as tasked. It found that Rawalpindi police chief Saud Aziz did not act independently in ordering the crime scene hosed down or in preventing a post-mortem examination.

Responsibility for the attack was widely attributed to militant networks linked to al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, a claim Mehsud's spokesman denied. Bhutto herself had named several Pakistani officials in a letter to President Pervez Musharraf as posing a threat to her life prior to her death.

Legal proceedings followed for years. In November 2011, a Pakistani court indicted two police officers, including the former Rawalpindi police chief, along with five men described as affiliated with Baitullah Mehsud. In August 2013, Musharraf was indicted on charges including murder and conspiracy to murder over an alleged failure to provide adequate security. In August 2017, an anti-terrorism court acquitted the five Taliban-linked suspects for lack of evidence, sentenced two police officers to 17 years in prison, and declared Musharraf a fugitive. Musharraf was separately sentenced to death in absentia in December 2019 on unrelated treason charges concerning suspension of the constitution. In February 2023, a Lahore High Court bench heard appeals in the case, dismissing the appeal against Musharraf following his death.