IN A POSTHUMOUS autobiography excerpted in The Sunday Times today, Benazir Bhutto names the 16-year-old son of Osama Bin Laden as the leader of one of four gangs of “designated assassins” sent to kill her.
The former Pakistan prime minister, who was assassinated as she left a rally in Rawalpindi in December, reveals she was warned by both President Pervez Musharraf and a “friendly Muslim government” that Hamza Bin Laden was planning her murder.
The naming of Bin Laden’s teenage son appears to bolster intelligence claims that Hamza is being groomed as a future leader of Al-Qaeda.
In her new autobiography, Bhutto writes: “I was told by both the Musharraf regime and the foreign Muslim government that four suicide bomber squads would attempt to kill me. These included, the reports said, the squads sent by the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud; Hamza Bin Laden, a son of Osama Bin Laden; Red Mosque militants; and a Karachi-based militant group.”
Little has been heard of Hamza since he featured in a joint Taliban and Al-Qaeda video, shot in 2001, of a militant attack on a Pakistan army camp in South Waziristan, a militant stronghold near the Afghan border.
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Last September Hamza was described in reports as a senior Al-Qaeda leader who had been waging jihad in the lawless tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Bhutto’s book also describes how a suicide bomb attack on her motorcade in Karachi when she returned home last October may have been carried out by a would-be assassin who lined the clothes of a toddler with plastic explosive to turn the child into a bomb.
She says a man gestured to her to hold the child, before trying to hand it to police in a nearby van, which exploded soon afterwards.