Bhutto's Aide Accuses Government Of A Cover-Up In Bhutto's Medical Report

December 29, 2007 2:26 p.m. EST

Naudero, Pakistan (AHN) - Different versions of stories emerged from Pakistan speculating on what caused the death of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto more than 48 hours after her assassination as she left a campaign rally on Thursday.

Two of the opposing stories stand out amid several others: the supporters of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party claim that her death was not an accident but a case of clear assassination. However, the government claims that she died after hitting her head on a lever on the sunroof of her vehicle.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani government has approved exhuming her body, which Bhutto's party members suspect is being done because Pakistan's government is trying to end controversy over the cause of her death.

Just a few hours after her death, reports quoting Bhutto's party information secretary said that she died of bullet wounds to her head before the gunman blew himself up, killing 23 people in the rally.

As the violence continued to escalate across the country, Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, a spokesman for the Ministry of Interior, said that he would stick by his statement earlier.

"What we gave you were facts, absolute facts corroborated by the doctors' reports," he said at a news briefing on Saturday, the New York Times reported. "It was corroborated by the evidence of the footage we showed you," he added.

According to the report, six doctors ratified and signed Bhutto's medical report that had no mention of a bullet wound. The report, as Brig. Cheema told New York Times, found that Bhutto had a single wound "on the right temporoparietal region."

The medical report gave the cause of death as "open head injury with depressed skull fracture, leading to cardiopulmonary arrest."

However, Pakistan People's Party information secretary, Sherry Rehman, rejected the official version claiming that Benazir Bhutto sustained bullet injuries to her head.

"It's beginning to look like a cover up to me," Rehman told CNN in a separate interview. Rehman's account presents the opposite side of what the government has been claiming using the medical report. The party members believe that she was shot at as Bhutto was profusely bleeding on her way to the hospital where she was declared dead.

"There were clear bullet injuries to her head," said Rehman. "When we bathed her we saw that."

Rehman's suspicion about the government's medical report could be true as just 24 hours after the assassination of Bhutto, the Interior Ministry said in a statement on Friday that she was killed by shrapnel from the explosion.

"The government comes up with the most bizarre, dangerous nonsense and it indicates that they are abdicating themselves of all responsibility by saying that she may have knocked her head or concussed her head against one of the levers on the sunroof," Rehman told CNN.

Moreover, violence and tension in the region continues to prevail as the riots across the country has taken 38 lives so far according to the authorities on Saturday.