In one of her last media interviews, slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto had voiced fear that she may be targeted by terrorists and went on to urge US President George W Bush to reverse the pro-Musharraf policies which were "breaking up" Pakistan.
“I am what the terrorists most fear,” she had said in the interview with Parade magazine, “a female political leader fighting to bring modernity to Pakistan. Now they’re trying to kill me.”
Asked what she would you like to tell President Bush, the Pakistan People’s Party leader had said that she would say propping up Pervez Musharraf government, which is infested with radical Islamists, is only hastening disaster.
“I would say, ‘Your policy of supporting dictatorship is breaking up my country.’ I now think al-Qaeda can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years.” The interview with Parade magazine, which is distributed as an insert with many American newspapers like the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times, was recorded just days before Bhutto was killed on December 27. The magazine went to print on December 21.
She had said she first heard the name of Osama bin Laden in 1989, when he sent USD 10 million to the ISI to help it overthrow her first government.
“I was ignorant of the extremist war of these new radical Islamists until my second term.”
