Shah took his wife and daughter into their apartment and tried to calm the situation down. Raehana and Sassi went to their bedroom and Shah brought his young daughter a bottle of milk. He settled them to sleep and moved to the living room. Meanwhile Papa and some other family members left for the casino and spent the rest of the evening there together, leaving at five in the morning – closing time – and going to the nearby Manhattan restaurant before driving home. Papa reached us around 6.30 in the morning and went to sleep. What happened next is a mystery.
On the morning of the 18th, Papa got up and ran some errands in town. He picked up a copy of the Herald Tribune and returned to his mother’s flat. At a quarter to two in the afternoon Raehana rang the doorbell. She was very distressed, and initially Papa was not in the mood to receive her. Joonam saw that something was amiss and asked Murtaza to come and talk to her. ‘Something is wrong,’ Raehana told them. ‘At that moment, I thought Shah must have hurt himself doing something in the house,’ Murtaza would later tell the police. No one will remember later on if the word ‘overdose’ was used or if it was not. Joonam immediately called the police and gave them Shah’s address.
Papa got into Shah’s metallic green Mercedes that Raehana had driven over with Sassi at her side and took them back to Shah’s flat. On the way, another family member who was with them in the car asked how Shah was. Everyone remembers Raehana saying he was blue. Murtaza would recall being frightened and asked her angrily if he was dead or alive. The thought hadn’t occurred to him until then. She replied that she didn’t know, she had been too scared to look.
They entered the apartment and found Shah’s body lying face down on the living-room floor, between the sofa and the coffee table. ‘When I saw him,’ Murtaza would later say, ‘I knew he was dead.’ Shah had blue marks on his chest and his face had already begun to turn a blue-ish black. He was wearing the trousers he had on from the previous evening, but no shirt. He was dead.
When Murtaza saw the blue marks on his brother’s body, he knew something unnatural had happened. He suspected poison. He directed someone to go downstairs to see if the police had arrived, and began to search the apartment. A year earlier, the brothers had been given small vials of poison to take if they were ever apprehended by Zia’s authorities. Nobody knows where they got the poison from; they kept that to themselves. The small bottles were sealed with metal and contained a colourless liquid. If mixed with another liquid, they were told, the poison would be undetectable. If taken, they were warned, the toxins would work quickly and they would be dead within minutes.
The police arrived and immediately began to inspect the flat. Murtaza looked for the poison in all the rooms, but found nothing. He searched the kitchen cupboards, careful not to move anything. A doctor, who came hours too late to save Shah, was standing in the kitchen when Murtaza opened the rubbish bin and found under several tissues a small glass bottle labelled ‘PENTREXIDE’. He gave the bottle to the doctor and informed the police of what he had found. Murtaza told the police that Shah had already survived four attempts on his life. He told them that they had enemies. He asked them if it was possible that the flat had been broken into. He told them that he didn’t believe, not even for a second, that Shah had committed suicide.
Before Shah’s body could be taken away, Murtaza had one more thing to do. He had to tell their mother. He got back into the car and drove to Nusrat’s apartment. She had been calling and asking what had happened, and had been told repeatedly, ‘Mir will tell you, he’ll come and tell you himself.’ Mir reached his mother’s flat alone. She opened the door, hysterical with worry. He held her by the arms and told her that Shah was dead. ‘Mummy, Gogi’s gone,’ he said, using the family’s childhood nickname for Shah. Nusrat fell weeping into his arms and demanded he take her to see him. We all went back to the apartment, even me. There was no one to look after Sassi and me, so we were taken back to the crime scene with the rest of the family.
Sassi had been the one to find her father that afternoon. ‘I’ve been haunted by flashbacks of discovering my father’s lifeless body,’ she told me twenty-four years later. ‘It is the only clear memory I possess of him. It was so long ago, but I remember it vividly, staring at him lying there, waiting for him to wake. It was my duty to wake him up every morning. But this particular morning was far from routine, because my father wouldn’t wake up and grab me and kiss me or toss me in the air as he usually did.’1 Raehana later said that it had been her daughter’s frightened voice that woke her up that day. She heard Sassi in the living room calling, ‘Papa, Papa,’ over and over again. When she found her, Sassi was sitting next to her father’s lifeless body trying to wake him up.
The initial investigation found specks of vomit on the floor of the bathroom attached to the couple’s bedroom. The police confirmed that they had found poison in Shah’s system, that it was strong and that it was designed to leave a residue in the victim’s nostrils, not in the blood or internal organs. But who administered the poison, no one can tell me.
Theories circulated quickly. There was the obvious – General Zia had ordered the hit on Shah’s life. Though Murtaza was the elder brother and technically in charge of the organization leading the attacks on the military regime, he was regarded as the diplomat. There was a strong perception that Shah was the more aggressive of the two brothers; he was, after all, in charge of security and training. Murtaza always believed Zia’s government had ordered the assassination. But how they carried it out was harder to explain.
Of course others assumed that he had committed suicide, a claim furiously denied by Murtaza. He told reporters and policemen that Shah ‘had a very courageous character. He knew how to face life. He was never scared and always moved without a bodyguard. He knew how to face all types of situations.’ He told the investigators that his brother was happy, successful and financially settled, and had never at any point in their lives together mentioned the notion of killing himself. There was no suicide note, no indication from the previous night or recent past that he had even contemplated the idea. Nusrat also denied the possibility of suicide. It was a sin in Islam to take one’s own life. She never believed Shah, who had faced his father’s death so bravely, would reach a point so far beyond hope that he would kill himself. But others felt differently. Fowzia told the police that she felt Shah had killed himself and that the Bhutto family was too proud to ever admit it. It was an assumption that hurt the family gravely.
And then, there was another theory, the main one. I have spent my life believing that Shah’s wife, Raehana, had something to do with her husband’s death. The autopsy placed the time of Shah’s death in the early hours of the morning, approximately nine hours passed before the family and police were called to the scene. It didn’t escape anyone’s attention that Raehana had not raised the alarm until well past the time of death. This is where things get tricky. The police statements that Raehana made still exist and her testimony shakes everything up. It is rambling and incoherent. I have read the statements, both in French and in English. I have had them translated and retranslated. I have read them backwards and forwards and I still don’t know what to make of them.
My own experience with the police leaves me with little trust in confessions obtained under detention. I don’t believe that there are truths only the police can beat out of us. I cannot use Rachana’s statements for this reason. I cannot say with any certainty that I know those police files to be an honest indication of the facts.
I grew up with my family’s belief that Raehana had been involved in some way. She hadn’t called for help in time. She hadn’t reacted fast enough. She had a rocky relationship with her husband. She’d thrown Murtaza out of the apartment the night before. There had always been distrust and dislike. In Raehana’s police testimony, there is a suggestion that she did not help Shah as he lay dying, but a clear assertion that she did not kill him.
Raehana was detained and spent time in jail in Nice. She was questioned over a period of
several months and then released. She then left France and flew to California to be with her family who were already looking after Sassi. It was the last time any of us saw her.
It was on the basis of Raehana’s statements to the police that Murtaza and Benazir filed a case against her in France, on behalf of the Bhutto family, citing the country’s Good Samaritan law. Jacques Vergès, the controversial French lawyer, would be the family’s advocate in the case and he would secure a conviction passed in absentia against Raehana for not coming to the aid of a dying man.
I remember my father’s growing doubts over the years as to what had happened that night in Nice. He was often silent when my aunts would be screaming blue murder in reference to Raehana. I remember that Papa was always unsure of what had really happened. But by then it was too late. Too much time, too much anger, too much sadness had passed. He blamed himself for not being there that night to protect his younger brother. That always stayed with him. Papa lost weight. He lost his smile and his ability to joke and laugh. Joonam too, I remember, took the death like a weight upon her heart. She was never the same again.
Sassi and I would not see each other for another twenty-three years. As children, we exchanged occasional letters and spoke on the phone once in a while but our contact was minimal. We both dreamed of meeting again one day, of our fathers’ joy at knowing we would be reunited someday, but it never seemed very likely. Then, on the night of my twenty-sixth birthday, a month after I had started work on this book, I got an email from her. It turned my night upside down. It had been many years since we had been in touch, at least eleven, and I didn’t know what to expect. I wrote back and asked for her phone number. We spoke several days later. We were adults now. We had graduated from high school, had gone to college and had embarked on postgraduate studies. We were no longer children. We spoke and eased ourselves into knowing each other again.
Sassi wanted to come to Pakistan. She wanted to pray at her father’s grave. She had never been here before, never seen an inch of her father’s country. We started planning immediately. We would have to get her to Karachi clandestinely, as there were many on our aunt’s side of the family who would not like the idea of us finally getting together and trading stories. We had been kept apart during Benazir’s lifetime and it wasn’t going to be easy to bypass what remained of her legacy. We planned to meet in Abu Dhabi, at the airport. I would fly to London first, pretending I was on an ordinary trip. Sassi would book a flight from New York, where she was studying, to the Gulf, a move that would avoid any suspicion should Pakistani officials be on the lookout for a Bhutto entering Pakistan. I would book our onward flights and bring her home. No one knew Sassi was coming to Karachi except for Mummy and Zulfi. She hadn’t told anyone and neither had I.
We had planned to meet at a specific point in Abu Dhabi’s tiny airport, but bumped into each other before we reached it. We recognized each other instantly though we had grown to look like different people. My hair was curly and medium-length and hers was wavy and long. She brought a bracelet for us to share. As soon as we were on our flight to Karachi we began to compare notes and found too many unsettling similarities.
The next two weeks were a blur of travel between Karachi and Larkana. We visited Shah’s grave and Sassi was overwhelmed by the emotion of finally being next to her father again. We took her to her father’s house, the one in Naudero that Zufikar had hoped Shah would live in and contest elections from. It was occupied by Benazir’s widower now and had been by her before him. The seat had been contested by Benazir in 1988. It was the seat from which she ascended to the office of the Prime Minister. We couldn’t enter the house. We were enemies to those inside. Later, sitting in the room that our fathers once shared as they did everything else, we broached the topic of her mother. I told her what little I had heard growing up, that the family blamed Raehana for Shah’s death. Sassi wasn’t surprised to hear that. She had grown up under the weight of those accusations. But what she had to say had never occurred to me before. It was then, for the first time in my short life, that I heard the other side.
‘The version of events commonly accepted about my father’s death angered and frustrated me,’ Sassi said. ‘I knew the truth and I wanted it to be known that my mother was in no way responsible for my father’s death. But I also knew that there was too much power, too many other forces that would prevent this from coming out early on.’ I hadn’t ever considered that there might be something else to the story; it wasn’t what I was expecting to hear. ‘She was an easy target,’ Sassi said, speaking of her mother. ‘If she were truly culpable, why did they let her go? And why were no other suspicions investigated? We certainly did not benefit from his death in any form.’
They were all good points. Why had Raehana been let go if she was involved? By all accounts she was not kept long as a suspect. She had been released and allowed to leave the country, surely not standard procedure for a murder suspect. But then who was responsible? I asked. And the answer, the possibility of who was to blame, at least indirectly in terms of benefiting from Shah’s death, was nothing I had ever imagined before. It was scandalous, mind-blowing. But I knew, from experience, that anything is possible in the Bhutto family.
Sassi and I spent several months together after that. She took time off school and we travelled and spent time in Karachi together, living as our fathers once did in their annexed bachelor pad. We talked about Sassi’s parents often and sat until late at night trying to understand what had happened to her father. ‘My feelings concerning my father’s death?’ Sassi responded when I put the question to her in an email. ‘I am angry, hurt, saddened. I regret not having been able to form more memories with him. I am angry that his life was taken from him, my mother, and me at such a young age. I am hurt that my mother had to endure so much pain. At a time when everyone should have formed a cohesive union, divisions were created instead. I am perplexed that there was no formal investigation into his death in Pakistan. It seems quite strange and convenient.’
I flew to Paris in the spring of 2009 on my quest to find someone who could tell me what happened that night in France, and finally made contact with Jacques Vergès. I had set up an appointment to meet in his office on a nondescript road in the heart of the capital. I had met Vergès before. I was maybe four years old and had sat in his office while my father and he discussed Shah’s case. I remember he had small boxes on his desk that I busied myself opening and closing while they spoke of the case against Raehana. So it was that I found myself being received again, this time in a different office, by the man who might – I imagined – be my best bet for some definitive answers.
Except for his deafness, Vergès, now in his eighties, showed no sign of his age. He looked just as I remembered him, a slight man with thinning grey hair, dapperly dressed. He ushered me into his office. ‘I was a good friend of Mir’s,’ he said to me in his thick French accent. ‘I was very sorry to hear when he was killed.’ I thanked him quietly, trembling and trying to appear at least nominally professional. ‘And Benazir,’ Vergès said and my heart thumped. People did this to me all the time. ‘What a shame about your father, but Benazir oh what a tragedy her loss has been.’ I imagined that Vergès was about to launch into a eulogy I had heard many times before. But he didn’t. He shook his head and muttered an expletive. He had known her well and his disparaging remark caught me slightly off guard. He patted my shoulder and directed me towards two chairs. I laughed nervously and followed Vergès into his office.
We sat facing each other in front of his beautifully elaborate desk and spoke for a minute or two about my father and mother and his memories of them both. Finally, I plucked up the courage to ask about the case. ‘I wanted to make a big scandal about Shah’s murder,’ Vergès said, ‘but Benazir was against it. She didn’t want to fight the CIA and the Pakistani Intelligence service, who your father was always convinced were behind his brother’s death.’2 Why not? I asked, genuinely curious. Vergès laughed again and made a face a
t me that I understood. Because she worked with them. Because her power was always based on their approval. Months before her death, reports now claim, Benazir contacted Blackwater, America’s mercenary contractors, to provide the security for what would be her last election campaign. They declined. But my father, I asked, what did he think? ‘He was convinced and was prepared to make a stir, but his sister, she stopped it.’ Nobody believed it was suicide, Vergès confirmed, it just wasn’t a possibility.
Gathering my strength, I asked about Raehana. Was there a chance she wasn’t involved? ‘The case against Raehana was difficult,’ Vergès said, pausing as he spoke, speaking in English for my benefit. ‘There was no concrete proof, only suspicions.’ I mentioned what I had read in the police files, mentioning that as far as I understood it she had raised the red flag herself in her testimony. Is there a chance that there was something else at play? That Raehana, a young twenty-three year old widow could have been coerced into making statements that would ultimately backfire against her? Again, Vergès shrugged his shoulders. My head was spinning. I hadn’t expected this. I had expected that Vergès would say to me in all certainty that X is the guilty party and Y is not. But he wasn’t saying that to me. He wasn’t at all. I was sitting on the edge of my finely woven antique chair so Vergès could hear me clearly and I lowered my voice, uselessly, to ask the unthinkable, remembering what Sassi had told me months before: why did Benazir leave the case so skewed by refusing to fight it all the way? Did she have something to gain by not pursuing it? My hands were shaking so hard I could barely write. ‘It’s not impossible,’ Vergès replied cautiously.
Why? I asked, edging closer towards him and willing myself not to whisper. It was like blasphemy, this idea, how was it possible? Why was it not unthinkable? ‘It’s clear that when Mir and Shah decided to take this action,’ Vergès said, referring to AZO, ‘that Benazir would not approve. She was on another track – one with Western cooperation, especially with the USA. They were both against it, fighting it openly. I am not surprised that it would benefit her for one brother to be disposed of before the other.’ Vergès’s words hung in the air between us. I felt nauseous. Why was everything in this family so complicated? Why was it so ugly, so violent? Earlier, when he had spoken about my father, Vergès asked me about our situation in Pakistan. I told him life was difficult there, but that we remained. ‘Imagine, to be killed by your own sister,’ he muttered and I felt that I might cry. I nodded and told him that we had been heartbroken by my father’s murder. But when we began to discuss Shahnawaz and Benazir’s name came up I had asked what role she had played, if she even had a role . . . We spoke about how she did not do right by Shah’s family, how she had usurped his rights. And there was that word again. It stung in my ears. But why Shah first? He wasn’t in charge, my father was. ‘In her mind, what her two brothers were doing wasn’t helping her,’ Vergès calmly speculated. ‘Among the two brothers, the strongest brother was Mir. Perhaps it was necessary to get Shah out of the way because he was the weaker one.’
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