This first interaction is an apt motif for most of Munoz and his team’s efforts at investigating one of Pakistan’s most recent miasmas. All of them are detailed in his recent book “Getting Away with Murder: Benazir Bhutto’s Assassination and the Politics of Pakistan”. Reading it therefore, is an exercise in confronting the questions that six years since the tragedy, continue to defy clarity or conclusion. One example; the constitution of the convoy that went to Liaqat Bagh that fateful December afternoon and the one that returned. According to the plans Munoz discovered, a bulletproof black Mercedes was at the back of the convoy that included Benazir’s white Land Cruiser. Also included in the plans was the detail that the police protocol, as it approached the venue would be a box model in which Benazir’s car would be flanked front and back by police vehicles. Videos of the convoys arrival reveal that this box model never happened, there were never any police cars flanking the Cruiser.
The meanderings of the black Mercedes that was supposed to be the alternate car for Benazir were just as confounding. Containing among others, would be Interior Minister Rehman Malik, the vehicle was nowhere to be found after the suicide attack at the Liaqat Bagh venue. According to Munoz, details that were available reported that it had long left for Zardari House; and it did not turn back even when those inside it were told about the attack. The Cruiser with the dying Benazir in it continued to drive out of the venue even with all of its tires blown out, its driver trying his best to get out of the line of mayhem. The rescue car that should have been there was not. And for quite a while, neither was any ambulance.
Then, there is the issue of the never done autopsy on a woman killed under the most suspicious of circumstances. Munoz recreates it well, capturing the pathos, the peril and layers of bureaucracy that made the mad mix. Pakistani law, he recounts requires an autopsy to be performed in such circumstances. The doctor in charge of the hospital asked the police official in charge whether it could be done. Permission was refused because the police official said he felt that he could not authorise it. Benazir was a woman, her husband was not there, and the family should make the decision. This autopsy was never done and the body was taken instead to Chaklala Air Base, already in a coffin. In one heartbreaking detail, we learn that Benazir Bhutto’s dupatta was never found. Her shoes left initially in the bloodied car, were eventually returned.
Much of the rest is known; and Pakistanis, unlike Munoz are too hardened in their hopelessness to expect much from investigations and commissions. The investigation from Scotland Yard that arrived closest to the assassination searched for evidence even though the venue had been hosed down with water. Tracing the water’s current, they managed to find bullet casings in the drain where the blood had been washed away. Munoz carefully recounts these efforts, as well as his own Commission’s painstaking investigations to get to the truth. Wrought in the narrative hence are the perplexing, and sometimes contradictory claims of various investigative agencies, government ministers, police officials and intelligence commanders; a mottled, tangled web spun over what were once, facts.
Sadly, as Pakistanis could have told him, power has long since killed truth in their country and the very story he tells, built on the abandoned carcasses of so many other unsolved assassinations could not be any different. When political leaders die in Pakistan, it is not justice but legacy that is at issue. It is the latter that is saved and salvaged, kept carefully to serve as the foundation for future trajectories of political power.
In that exercise, it not the truth but the myth that prevails and that is the basis of belief. So it has been in the case of Benazir Bhutto, even if it has meant that some or many, as the title of Munoz’s book proclaims are “getting away with murder.”