Who killed BB?

By Cyril Almeida



It’s late 2007. A suicide attack has taken place in a high-security zone in Rawalpindi. The top cop in the city is CPO Saud Aziz. The crime scene is quickly scrubbed clean, rendering forensic science largely irrelevant.
BB’s assassination? No, the attack in question occurred in October 2007, “less than a kilometre from President General Pervez Musharraf’s camp office,” according to Dawn’s report.

Pakistanis love a good conspiracy, and often enough they get enough raw material, ‘facts,’ to spin shocking tales. Add the BB report to that list of ‘facts’.

I don’t know if then MI chief Nadeem Ijaz ordered Saud Aziz to hose down the site of BB’s assassination. I doubt we’ll ever know the truth. But I do know the UN commission lit a fire under the particular allegation in spectacular style.

Paragraph 133, the one that postulates the MI-CPO connection, is a masterful demonstration of diplomatic doublespeak. It ends with the following: “However, [the sources] were not willing to state on the record what it is that ‘everyone knows’. This is one of the many occasions during the Commission’s inquiry when individuals, including government officials, expressed fear or hesitation to speak openly.”

Translation: God knows if these guys know what they are talking about, but they sound awfully sure so they must know. Y’know how Pakistan is, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Let the Pakistanis figure it out.

If there was one thing the UN commission seems to have figured out, it was to avoid the fate of the Scotland Yard ‘the-escape-hatch-killed-BB’ investigation. Much derided and dismissed, the Scotland Yard guys made a fatal mistake: they affixed their names to a specific theory.

The UN guys did no such thing. Whatever the conspiracy theory you subscribed to before, you can find something in the report to back up your theory.

Start with the ‘Musharraf did it’ camp. There are so many references to the ‘pervasive’ intelligence agencies in the UN report, that this particular theory can seem like a slam dunk, with the allegations against the MI chief, a loyal Musharraf man, the smoking gun. They had something to hide; ergo the crime scene was hosed down.

But a closer reading of the report points to a more prosaic theory: that the TTP/Al Qaeda/militants wanted BB dead and Mush made it easy for them to kill her. Why?

If it weren’t so terribly tragic, it could have been a soap opera. Mush, the recalcitrant son, had exhausted his godfather’s, America’s, patience. Exasperated, the godfather had decided to marry him off to a woman. The strong-willed bride-to-be was supposed to get Mush to focus on protecting the family empire by eliminating its rivals, the Taliban.

But Mush, long used to being king of his castle, wasn’t willing to share the limelight with a new lady, BB. He tried everything to deter BB from coming to live in his kingdom. When all else failed, he tried to make her feel unsafe, knowing full well the rival empire, the Taliban, would want to eliminate her.

The rivals were worried that at long last the godfather’s dream of crushing them was about to come true. Bickering or not, the marriage would pose a formidable threat to the Taliban’s power.

The only way to stop the marriage would be take out one of the two partners. The Taliban had tried and failed to get Mush and now it was all but impossible. BB, though, was a possibility. Helpful was the squabbling between the reluctant couple, which left her exposed. Fast forward to Dec 27, and the dirty deed is done.

But the theory gets little play because it’s based on something few Pakistanis know much, or anything, about: militancy. Everyone, though, knows about Musharraf. And about Zardari and his buddies, of course.

The ‘Zardari did it’ camp has leapt on to para 96 of the UN report. The one about the back-up bullet-proof Merc sent from Zardari House with Rehman Malik and Babar Awan on board. Aha, they fled the scene of the blast, so they must be involved.

Regicide is certainly an ancient practice and human nature hasn’t changed much in the intervening millennia. But I’ve yet to meet anyone who thinks Zardari and his buddies may have been involved in BB’s death who doesn’t also harbour a bitter, visceral hatred for the man and his circle.

The theory would be far more convincing if someone who occasionally has something charitable to say about Zardari also subscribed to it. Say what you will about the man and his circle of shady characters, but having access to a rent-a-suicide-bomber assassination squad?

The other ‘fact’ that this group leaps on is that Zardari has shown little interest in using the state apparatus to investigate BB’s assassination and has rewarded all the ‘suspects’ in the PPP with top slots. Again, a more prosaic theory is available: Zardari possibly calculated that the PPP, now his PPP, needed to be in power after 12 years in the wilderness to re-establish linkages with the electorate rather than take on a shadowy enemy with uncertain consequences for the PPP’s, his party’s, future.

None of this is to suggest that Musharraf or Zardari couldn’t have done it. We, the public, simply know too little to definitively dismiss any possibility.

But it is striking how the more extreme theories — that Musharraf or Zardari did it, for example — are the mainstream ones, and the more obvious one — that the militants did it — is at best relegated to quirky status.

Our army has sent a hundred and fifty thousand troops to battle this enemy, our state has spent hundreds of billions of rupees to fight it, we have lost tens of thousands of men, women, children and soldiers to it.

So extreme is this enemy that anyone who knows anything about, say, the Laskhar-i-Jhangvi wouldn’t be surprised if it decided to kill BB because she wore a Shia amulet on her arm the day she returned to Pakistan.

And yet nobody seems to think the enemy within could have killed BB.

Who killed BB? Someone did, clearly. But with our eyes wide shut we’ll never get any closer to finding her killers.

Source.The Dawn