Pakistan's government is pointing fingers at al Qaeda-linked militants for the death of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and claims she died by bumping her head following the suicide blast.
Citing what it said was an intercepted phone call, the interior ministry said the killing had been ordered by an "al-Qaeda leader", Baitullah Mehsud.
The BBC's security correspondent, Frank Gardner, says it is too early to establish the truth of what happened. ...
Baitullah Mehsud is a tribal leader in Pakistan's South Waziristan region.
Pakistani intelligence services intercepted a call from him in which he allegedly congratulated another militant after Ms Bhutto's death, interior ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema told reporters.
There was, he added, "irrefutable evidence that al-Qaeda, its networks and cohorts were trying to destabilise Pakistan".
There have now been so many conflicting versions coming out of Pakistan of how Benazir Bhutto died and who sent the assassin that it is hard for anyone to build up an accurate picture, our security correspondent says. ...
Brig Cheema said Ms Bhutto had smashed her head against a lever of her car's sun roof.
She was, he said, trying to shelter inside the car from the gunman, who set off a bomb after opening fire with a gun.
A surgeon who treated her, Dr Mussadiq Khan, said earlier she may have died from a shrapnel wound while Ms Bhutto's security adviser, Rehman Malik, said she had been shot in the neck and chest.
Farooq Naik, a senior official in Ms Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, said the government's explanation of her death was a "pack of lies".
"Two bullets hit her, one in the abdomen and one in the head," he told AFP news agency.
Do you know what the truth is? I don't, although one would think a competently-conducted autopsy would resolve whether she was shot, whether she was wounded by shrapnel or whether her skull was fractured following the explosion.
However, no autopsy was performed!
Suspects
A Times of London article has this to say:
(Besides Mehsud), the other was Haji Omar, the leader of the Pakistani Taleban, who is also from South Waziristan and fought with the Afghan Mujahidin against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Ms Bhutto said after the attack that she had received a letter, signed by someone claiming to be a friend of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, threatening to slaughter her like a goat. But she also accused Pakistani authorities of not providing her with sufficient security, and hinted that they may have been complicit in the Karachi attack.
She indicated that she had more to fear from unidentified members of a power structure that she described as allies of the “forces of militancy”.
Analysts say that President Musharraf is unlikely to have ordered her assassination, but that elements of the Army and intelligence service stood to lose money and power if she became prime minister. The ISI includes some Islamists who became radicalised while running the American-funded campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan and were opposed to her on principle. Saudi Arabia is also thought to have frowned on Ms Bhutto as being too secular and Westernised and to have favoured Nawaz Sharif, another former Prime Minister.
Bronwen Maddox, the Times' chief foreign affairs commentator, had this to say about Bhutto's approach to security:
She was lucky to survive the suicide blast at her homecoming parade in Karachi, where her party workers had drummed up hundreds of thousands of supporters for a rally. But the casualness and fatalism of those workers in providing her security made a successful attempt on her life seem only a matter of time. Even the day after the Karachi blast they allowed hundreds of foreign media workers bearing heavy electronic equipment* to crowd into her family compound. Many of them were not scanned for explosives, a gesture at security which bore no resemblance to a modern, determined attempt to protect the life of an irreplaceable leader.
* In 2001, just before 9/11, al Qaeda took out Ahmed Masoud Shah, a key leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, with suicide bombers disguised as a television news team.
Maddox also makes these points about why Bhutto supporters will see the hand of Musharraf in the actual deed:
Even though the Karachi bomb followed explicit threats on her life by Islamic militants -- and to many, they are still the most plausible perpetrators -- many PPP supporters assumed that it was the work of the intelligence agencies. Even those standing by the bodies of injured relatives in the Jinnah Post-graduate Medical Centre, the city's main hospital, firmly asserted that Musharraf and intelligence agents should bear responsibility, not Bhutto.
They will be even more inclined to see the hand of Musharraf in the assassination because it happened in Rawalpindi, the garrison town which is the head of Pakistan's military, and the site of Army House, where Musharraf lives (and where he has refused to leave, even though he has stepped down as head of the Army).
The Independent's Andrew Bower essentially argues that learning who is responsible for the murder will likely never be known. And even if it is, the various sides will never agree on it:
In a country which has experienced military coups, the suspicious death of one of its military leaders and the execution of another president and in which both the military and the shadowy intelligence services retain the dominant influence, people will be ready to believe any manner of fanciful ideas about who was behind Ms Bhutto's death. Pakistan is, after all, the place where conspiracies are played out all too often.
It was the same in Karachi. Two days after the attack in October, I had lunch with a group of Pakistani journalists of whom only one was prepared to accept that Islamic extremists were responsible.
At least one blamed the military and another blamed Ms Bhutto herself, suggesting that the attack was launched with her knowledge to build political support for the political campaign she was about to begin.
Bower noted that Baitullah Mehsud denied any role in the Oct. 18 attack on Bhutto.