Without an autopsy, we’ll never know.

Sending a guy with a gun and a suicide vest doesn’t seem too professional to me. It seems more like the kind of overkill often associaated with bloodthirsty Muslim fanatics. A professional would concentrate on employing one weapon well instead of deploying two weapons in the hope that one will work.

If a sniper hit Bhutto with a high powered bullet from a rifle, she wouldn’t have much of a head left to x-ray. Kennedy’s brains and skull were splattered all over Dealey Plaza when Oswald shot him. Bhutto’s skull looks remarkably intact, as you might expect after impact by a low-velocity pistol bullet or bullets.

Five snipers sounds like the kind of overkill one would expect to see in an action movie or comic book, not a professional military operation. One sniper may be easy to hide, but five aren’t. It sounds sloppy and undisciplined.

So my money is on sloppy, kill-crazy, unprofessional jihadis as the culprits.

OK, so now the Pakistani government, led by one President Pervez Musharraf, says that Bhutto wasn’t shot, but rather fractured her skull on the lever of her card sunroof as she dived back inside for cover. Hmmm. Somehow I am…

The official story is that ONE guy shot her, then blew HIMSELF up. All this “sophisticated operation” (terrorist lover) stuff is from the universal early speculation.

Bottom line – they stopped the 15-year old suicide bomber the day before, and let their guard down.

Apeking on December 28, 2007 at 8:21 PM

It makes more sense than some of the other theories, but it’s too bad that it’s from the Pakistani Government because no one will believe it.

Of all the theories, this sounds the most mundane and unglamorous, which means that it probably has a grain of truth to it.

broker1 said: I posted in a thread yesterday that Monsoor Ijaz was on Fox and said that “those that are certain that AQ did this need to take a step back, I believe Pakistani Black Ops organizations may have had a hand in this.”

I watched him as well. He was very frank about his relationship with Bhutto, i.e. not the best of friends but respectful of each other. I think we should take that step back and see what shakes out.

Putting aside the theory that she died from a head wound when she hit her head, if she was shot in the head (and/or neck) how did snipers know she was a) going to stick her head out through the sun roof and b) do so at a point when they were in range to shoot her? That doesn’t sound like a very good plan.

If we go with the theory that they used armor-piercing bullets, wouldn’t the driver and/or bodyguards have been shot too? Further, wouldn’t she have received some wounds to her torso or legs?

I realize these may sound like idiotic questions. I freely admit I know nothing about weapons or forensics.

In the end it may not matter, the only thing Musharraf can do is blame al Qaeda go after al Qaeda, hard, but even that may not save him.

But even so, have a look at the photos of Bhutto’s skull X-rays and the interior of the back seat of the vehicle. For a car that took a bomb blast at close proximity, it’s in awfully good shape.

x-Rays are very bad, but don’t look like a gunshot wound

Men with rifles who strike from a distance, then blow themselves up to avoid capture… that’s a whole different kettle of fish. Weird stuff. If we’re talking black ops commandos, trained snipers, seems like a waste of trained dudes to me.

I don’t think anyone has a clue how she was killed. The stories are all over the place

KBird on December 28, 2007 at 5:28 PM

It’s either KAPOW! or KABOOM! (possibly both).

I’ll chalk that up to inspecificity, but I’ll also note that I can’t see the bolt doing it, either, provided the premise isn’t that the force of the bomb blast drove her head into it. The lever/bolt is at around bicep level to Bhutto while she stands there. I can understand her stiffening if pulled and/or slipping back into the passenger compartment — stiffening would address acquiring the force for hitting her head whereas hitting something in a relaxed fashion would allow the head to bounce off the lever/bolt — but the space she is in is very confining and I can’t picture her head having the momentum to strike any part of the lever/bolt with sufficient force to stave her skull in the way the x-rays show, especially because the puncture is so high on the head and the direction she would moving: mostly down and not sideways, and she would be more likely to get a skin gash, not a bone puncture.

I say all this as a result of watching the CNN video in the previous post. Another thing. If you look at that video, her position in pretty much her last moments, but maybe not the very last, were facing at 90 degrees to the lever/bolt location. Her puncture is at the back of her head. If this really was the cause, she would have had to have turned her head almost 90 degrees for the lever/bolt to hit her where the wound is and her shoulder did not inhibit her head movement at all towards the lever/bolt even while slipping into the vehicle.

I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong or maybe she has paper thin bones or something. Maybe severe osteoporosis.

I did find it interesting that in the CNN vid, the cameraman didn’t catch her in the final second because he seemed to be distracted by something off to his left. It didn’t look like it was the bomb blast, though.

I went with the Lake story this morning, then reports emerged saying no bullet wounds.

I tend to believe Lake.

JammieWearingFool on December 28, 2007 at 5:05 PM

The slowed down video at CNN pretty clearly shows a shooter alongside the rear of the Bhutto vehicle firing a pistol in her direction just prior to the blast.

I tend to believe Lake.

Bottom line: she’s dead and there will be a hell of a scramble for power with her out of the way.