Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto returned home knowing the names and cell phone numbers of her possible assassins, she wrote in a book finished just days before her murder at a December election rally.
Bhutto wrote in Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West that Pakistani officials told her four suicide bomber squads had been sent by Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud, Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza, and two militant groups to kill her.
“I had actually received from a sympathetic Muslim foreign government the names and cell numbers of designated assassins,” said Bhutto, who accused Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf of not doing enough to protect her.
Bhutto said she sent a letter to Musharraf before returning in October in which she identified people in the Pakistani intelligence service whom she said would be responsible for her assassination.
“I told him if I was assassinated it would be due to the sympathisers of the militants in his regime, who I suspected wanted to eliminate me and remove the threat I posed to their grip on power.”