Making of a martyr

As soon as Bhutto fell down inside the car, he detonated a suicide bomb and blew himself up, killing 20 people around. The government's own footage clearly shows a gun being waved and the flash of a report.

Babar Awan, a leading lawyer and PPP official, was in the black Mercedes behind. "The cars were bumper to bumper," he said. "I rolled down the window of my side to keep an eye on Benazir. Then I heard a few shots and moments later there was a blast. I was the first to see her corpse. There was a bullet wound on her neck just below her left ear.

"On the forehead there was another wound with scattered shrapnel pieces. I could not say whether it was the entry or exit point of the bullet. But it was very powerful."

Doctors at the hospital initially described the bullet wound as the cause of death. But before her body was removed, doctors who examined Bhutto said she had died from shrapnel piercing her skull from the blast and that the x-rays showed no signs of bullets.

Then, at a press conference on Friday evening, Brigadier Javed Cheema, spokesman for the interior ministry, claimed that Bhutto had not been shot at all but had fractured her skull ducking down into the car to avoid the blast from the suicide bomber. "One of the levers of the sunroof hit her on the right side, which caused a fracture, and that is what caused her death," he said. "There was no bullet that hit Mohtarma Bhutto, there was no splinter that hit Mohtarma Bhutto and there was no pellet that hit her. I wish she had not come out of the roof top of her vehicle."

PPP supporters were outraged by this version, pointing out that the blast came only after Bhutto fell inside the car.

"This is rubbish. It's dangerous nonsense," said Sherry Rehman, Bhutto's spokeswoman, who was in the car behind. "I don't know how they say concussion from the sunroof. It's complete abdication of their responsibility for security.

"We've been tending the body since she was hit and there was a clear bullet wound at the back of the neck from which she bled profusely, soaking everyone else around."

We may never know the exact truth. Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, did not allow a postmortem examination and Rawalpindi police were quick to hose down the scene, thus wiping away any possible evidence, although Pakistani television showed a pistol lying among the blood and dismembered limbs in the street.

The government said last week that Asif can exhume his wife's body if he wants to have an autopsy.

To those who knew and loved Bhutto, not just the charismatic politician but also as a loyal friend and devoted mother, her killing was a tremendous shock. Yet if ever there was a death foretold, this was it.

When she was last in England in early October to witness her son Bilawal starting at Oxford, following in the footsteps of both herself and her father, she told me of her fears about returning home.

"I know there will be security risks, people who want to kill me and to scuttle the restoration of democracy," she said.

Then, if there was any doubt, the bus which she boarded at Karachi airport on October 18 for her triumphant return was the target of a double suicide bomb, the worst in Pakistan's history, killing 140 people. I was with her on top of that bus and know only too well how lucky we were to escape the carnage all around us. Bhutto admitted to me the following day that despite all the warnings she had been shocked when she heard the first blast. "My first thought was: oh my God, they've actually done it," she said.

The bus bomb made her rethink her plans to travel across the country by road but she insisted she would not stop holding rallies. "In Pakistan people want to see their leaders," she explained. "Our power base in the PPP are the poor and dispossessed - they don't have televisions or computers. They need to see us."

Talking of her children - Asifa, 14, Bakhtawar, 17, and Bilawal, 19 - she said: "I don't want to face suicide bombers or be assassinated but if it's the price I must pay ... they understand that."

She knew more than anyone the risks of a life in politics. One of her early memories was of being woken up late at night in 1963 by her father, who was then foreign minister, to read the diplomatic cables coming in about John F Kennedy's assassination. "This is no time to sleep," he told her. "The young president of the United States has been shot."

Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, became Pakistan's first democratically elected prime minister but was executed in 1979 by General Zia, who had ousted him. Her two brothers were also murdered; one poisoned, the other shot dead. The woman her father had encouraged her to take as a role model, India's Indira Gandhi, was assassinated in 1984.

That Bhutto was incredibly brave nobody doubts. But, given the risks, was she also foolhardy? Whenever I pressed her on this she always replied that "life and death are in God's hands". When I said she was making it easier for her enemies by appearing in public so often and refusing to hide behind the bullet-proof shields that her security built for her, she said: "I know they won't give up but I don't fear death. I remember my last meeting with my father just before he was hanged when he told me, ‘You know, tonight when I will be killed, my mother and my father will be waiting for me'."

It was almost as if she felt invincible. She called her memoir Daughter of the East and regarded herself as a daughter of destiny. She, rather than her brothers, was groomed from an early age to be the political heir to her father, even though she wanted to be a diplomat.

"My father always would say, ‘My daughter will go into politics... My daughter will become prime minister', but it's not what I wanted to do. I would say, ‘No, papa, I will never go into politics'.

"This is not the life I chose; it chose me. But I accepted the responsibility and I've never wavered in my commitment."

She would tell people how both Ramzi Yousef, who led the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9/11, had tried to kill her but failed.

"They succeeded with the World Trade towers but they didn't succeed with me," she said. "I don't think it can happen unless God wants it to happen because so many people have tried to kill me."

For all Bhutto's bravado, they got her in the end. It is an indication of how bad the situation is in Pakistan that there are so many possible culprits and that we will probably never find out who is guilty.

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