PAKISTAN:Benazir Bhutto has accused those with links to Pakistan's powerful military establishment of orchestrating Thursday's suicide bombing that killed 138 people and wounded 300.
Less than 24 hours after the assassination attempt, which has plunged Pakistan into a fresh crisis, Ms Bhutto yesterday said she had received extensive information about plots against her life - including names of ringleaders and telephone numbers - days before she flew to Karachi.
All of the details were included in a letter she sent to President Pervez Musharraf on Tuesday. "I told him that if something should happen to me the government should know certain things," she said at a high-security press conference at her Karachi home.
"This was a dastardly and cowardly attack," she said. "We believe democracy alone can save Pakistan from disintegration and a militant takeover. We are prepared to risk our lives and we are prepared to risk our liberty, but we are not prepared to surrender our great nation to the militants."
A "brotherly country" had provided Ms Bhutto with intelligence about four suicide squads roaming Karachi, she said. They came from the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, al-Qaeda and "a fourth group from Karachi".
She forwarded the details, including the names of three ringleaders, to Gen Musharraf on the eve of her return.
The sense of foreboding intensified after she landed. As her armour-plated vehicle inched through a throng of supporters on Thursday night, street lights along the route were inexplicably switched off. Last-minute efforts to alert the national security adviser, Tariq Aziz, failed.
Her security guards discovered two potential assailants - one armed with a pistol, the other wearing a suicide bombing vest, but it was too late to stop another two attackers, she said. Explosions sent an orange fireball high into the sky and scattered charred corpses and body parts.
The attack was the worst political violence in Pakistan for years and Ms Bhutto claimed more plots were in the works. "There are other attacks planned on me," she said, jabbing the air.
She described a scheme in which undercover army commandos would contrive a gunfight outside one of her homes in Karachi or Larkana, before killing her. "I'm not accusing the government . . . I trust nothing will happen," she said.
Ms Bhutto has previously accused the head of Pakistan's military intelligence agency and retired army officers of sympathising with the extremists who tried to kill her. After the blasts, her husband, Asif Zardari, directly accused the intelligence agencies of involvement.
Official accounts of the attack differed. The home secretary of Sindh province, Ghulam Mohatarem, told a news conference that a single suicide bomber had first thrown a grenade to break through the security cordon around Ms Bhutto's procession before leaping towards the truck and detonating his explosives. He blamed Islamist extremists for the attack but said he was unsure which group was responsible.
One of the main suspects denied any involvement. "I had nothing to do with it," Taliban commander Baitullah Masood told Reuters. Two weeks ago Masood vowed to dispatch bombers against Ms Bhutto in reaction to her pro-US policies.
Long-standing corruption charges against Ms Bhutto have been dropped but an amnesty signed by Gen Musharraf remains open to legal challenge.
Explaining how she escaped the bombing, she said she was resting her swollen feet inside the truck, going over a speech she was due to give at the tomb of Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.