Giving a new twist to last month’s Karachi bombings that claimed nearly 140 lives, former premier Benazir Bhutto has said that a “child suicide bomber” followed by a car bomb might have been used in an attempt to assassinate her.

“Although it remains difficult to know for certain, I doubt that a suicide bomber was involved in the attack on me.

I suspect, after talking to some of the injured, that the terrorists used a ‘small child’ as a ploy to get to me,” Bhutto wrote in commentary for CNN.

“They (terrorists) were trying to hoist the child — dressed in the colours of my party’s flag  onto my truck,” Bhutto said, adding that failing to do so, they dropped the child near her vehicle.

“Some witnesses said the child had been rigged as a human bomb. I can’t be sure. What followed was a massive explosion, killing scores immediately, tearing many bodies in half and sending blood, gore and flames up into the vehicle,” she said.

“In less than a minute, a second bomb — reports later suggested that a car bomb went off,” she wrote.

Bhutto survived unhurt when the blasts killing nearly 140 people took place near her armoured truck in a huge procession she led in Karachi after setting foot on Pakistani soil on October 18 for the first time in eight years.

Questioning as to why the investigation was initially given to a police officer who was present when her husband was nearly tortured to death in 1999, she said the most worrying was the “adamant rejection by Islamabad of any assistance from the state-of-art forensic teams from FBI and Scotland Yard.

She had called in international experts when her brother Murtaza was killed in what she said, “I believed was a conspiracy to destabilise my government in 1996.”

‘Sham investigation’

But she absolved President Pervez Musharraf of a hand in it, saying the “sham” investigation of the massacre and the attempt by the ruling party to politically capitalise on this catastrophe are discomforting, but do not suggest his direct involvement.

It has now been more than two weeks since the “horrific assassination attempt” against her and the police have still not filed her complaint, she said, adding that they filed their own report without taking statements from eyewitnesses on the truck targeted.

“I began to feel the net was being tightened around me when police security outside my home in Karachi was reduced, even as I was told that other assassination plots were in the offing,” she wrote in the commentary.

But she said she refused to holed up in her home a virtual prisoner and went to her ancestral village of Larkana to pray at my father’s grave. Stating that rise of extremism and militancy could not happen without support from elements within the administration, Bhutto asked Musharraf to revive the Constitution by lifting emergency.

She said that Musharraf has imposed martial law at a time when he should be demonstrating to the country and the world his seriousness in all owing free and fair elections.