KEY POINTS:
Defiant Benazir Bhutto has vowed to continue her party's campaign to challenge for Pakistan's political leadership as planned despite the assassination attempt that left at least 130 people dead and hundreds injured.
Hours after her jubilant return to Pakistan turned into tragedy when a huge explosive device was
detonated close to her convoy, Bhutto claimed she had been targeted because she stood for democracy rather than extremism. She claimed two suicide bombers were involved in the assault.
The presidential hopeful, looking sombre and wearing a black armband, told reporters in the garden of her relatives' Karachi home: "We will not stop our campaign, we will not stop our struggle. Despite the heavy losses we incurred yesterday, we will continue."
Bhutto demanded that the government launch an immediate inquiry into the attack, particularly into why street lights had been turned off shortly before the attack. She claimed had the street lights been on, her security personnel would have been able to see the attackers and intercept them.
Bhutto also has questions to answer herself.
She has so far failed to explain why she still insisted on setting off on a slow-moving, vulnerable convoy through Karachi's streets despite knowing from intelligence sources that at least four separate suicide cells were planning to attack her.
The wisdom of her decision appeared even more questionable after she revealed that 20 police officers and 50 young volunteer security guards drawn from her Pakistan's People's Party (PPP) were among the dead. She maintained that those who died did so protecting what she termed her campaign for democracy.
She said: "They stood their ground, and they stood all around the truck, and they refused to let the suicide bomber - the second suicide bomber - get near the truck."
Across a tense Karachi yesterday, funerals were held for the victims of the blast, which happened as Bhutto's convoy was making its way to a planned public rally. There were also calls for restraint.
At the city's Baitul Mukkaram mosque, high-profile cleric and Islamic scholar, Taqi Usmani, led Friday prayers, saying: "Save us from terrorism, from killings and from bomb blasts."
At the funeral of Inspector Shahab Khetian, a police veteran and the eldest of 10 brothers who was part of the security detail accompanying Bhutto, his nine-year-son Zeeshan cried as the coffin was lowered into the ground.
Once they have mourned the dead and dealt with the immediate aftermath of the attack, a key issue for Bhutto and her senior aides will be how best to spearhead the campaign for upcoming parliamentary elections.
Claiming that the party also has information that attacks are being planned against her when she returns to her ancestral home of Larkana, the PPP will have to decide whether it can safely allow Bhutto to have anything other than a very restricted public profile.
Such limited exposure could greatly hinder gaining further support for the PPP, which trades on the reputation of the former prime minister and her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was hanged by a military regime in 1979. Bhutto will undoubtedly seek to use the bombings to further burnish her self-portrayal as Pakistan's only chance of democracy.
However, many people across the country have questioned her decision to enter a power-sharing arrangement with President General Pervez Musharraf - a deal that effectively opened the way for her to return to Pakistan after eight years of self- imposed exile.
- THE INDEPENDENT
