1115.org

First it was a gunshot wound:

Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday after addressing a large gathering of her supporters.

Bhutto died of a gunshot wound to the neck, the Pakistani Interior Ministry said. The attacker then blew himself up. The bomb attack killed at least 22 others, doctors said.

Then it was shrapnel:

Authorities initially said she died from bullet wounds, but Dr. Mussadiq Khan, a surgeon who treated her, said Friday that she died from shrapnel that hit her on the right side of the skull.

Bhutto had no heart beat or pulse when she arrived at the hospital and doctors failed to resuscitate her, he said.

Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said he saw the medical report, and it, too, said she died from a shrapnel wound and was not shot. “No bullet was found in her body,” he said.

But that story didn’t have a very long-half life:

Pakistan’s interior ministry said Friday that Benazir Bhutto died from hitting her vehicle’s sunroof when she tried to duck after a suicide attack, and that no bullet or shrapnel was found in her.

Ministry spokesman Brigadier Javed Cheema said the opposition leader had died from a head wound she sustained when she smashed against the sunroof’s lever as she tried to shelter inside the car.

“The lever struck near her right ear and fractured her skull,” Cheema said. “There was no bullet or metal shrapnel found in the injury.”

Apparently, too many people laughed at that story, on the grounds that ducking couldn’t generate enough force to cause a fatal head injury. So Brigadier Cheema obligingly trotted out a new and improved version, which deals very nicely with that implausibility:

Benazir Bhutto died from a fractured skull caused by hitting her head on part of her car’s sunroof as a bomb ripped through a crowd of her supporters, a spokesman for Pakistan’s Interior Ministry said Friday.

“When she was thrown by the force of the shockwave of the explosion, unfortunately one of the levers of the sunroof hit her,” said spokesman Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema.

Back to Dr. Mussadiq Khan, who offers new detail in this account:

Dr. Mussadiq Khan of Rawalpindi General Hospital, who treated Bhutto before she was declared dead, said she had “a big wound” on the side of her head “that usually occurs when something big, with a lot of speed, hits that area.”

Perhaps we shall hear from the Brigadier again?

*** Update, 8:45 am December 29 ***

Here’s a spokeswoman from Bhutto’s party, in a PTI story put out early Saturday morning US time:

Dismissing as “absolutely nonesense (sic)” the Pakistan’s government version, a close aide of slain Benazir Bhutto on Saturday asserted that the former prime minister was hit in the head by a bullet.

“There was a bullet wound in the back of her head and it (the bullet) was (powerful) enough to come out from the other side,” said Sherry Rehman, adding that the wounded Bhutto was taken to hospital in her car.

Rehman described as “absolute nonsense” the interior ministry spokesman’s statement that Bhutto had died as a result of fracturing her skull when she hit her head against a metal lever on the sun-roof of her bulletproof vehicle following a suicide attack in Rawalpindi on Thursday.

Rehman, who was part of the group of women which bathed Bhutto’s body before her burial, also dismissed claims that Bhutto had been hit in the stomach by a second bullet.

“I saw her body and there was no wound in the stomach,” she said.

“There is no confusion about the cause of her death,” she was hit by a bullet,” Rehman, who was Bhutto’s spokesperson, told PTI on phone from Bhutto’s ancestral village of Naudero in Sindh province.

She also described the government’s account of Bhutto’s death presented during a press conference by interior ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema as a “concoction” and a “cover-up”.

*** Update #2, 9:06 am December 29 ***

It’s finally clear why the Pakistani government has been pushing those thin fabrications, who exactly they have been protecting. When a top tier Republican presidential candidate is personally responsible for the assassination, you do have to pussyfoot around the truth. But it’s okay now. Mike Huckabee has come clean and expressed “sincere… apologies for what has happened in Pakistan”.