# Who Killed Gen. Zia Ul Haq



## fatman17

*The Bear Trap*

How did the horrendous situation in Afghanistan, with all its implications for recent events and the present time, come to pass? What was the role of the CIA and Pakistani intelligence in the creation of what became the Taliban? What are the implications for the future and lessons from the past for American forces today?

This highly controversial book reveals one of the greatest military, political and financial secrets of recent times. It is nothing less than the true, if fantastic, account of how Pakistan and the USA covertly controlled the largest guerrilla war of the 20th Century, dealing to the Soviet Russian presence in Afghanistan a military defeat that has come to be called 'Russia's Vietnam'.

This compelling book, put together with great skill by the military author, Mark Adkin, and naratted by Brig. Mohammad Yusuf of the ISI, is essential reading for anyone interested in the truth behind the Soviets' Vietnam, and the reasons why, to this day, the war in Afghanistan still drags on despite the victory that the Mujahideen were denied when the Soviets withdrew. ? 



PROLOGUE
Crash, Culprits, and Cover up

'Zia's death must have been an act of God, ' Benazir Bhutto, Daughter of Destiny, 1988 .

When the camouflage painted Pakistan Air Force C-130 transport aircraft hit the ground it did so at an angle of 6S degrees. It was nose-diving, flaps up, wings level, landing gear up and locked, with all four engines functioning normally. It impacted at 190 knots. After a brief moment a monstrous ball Of orange flame consumed it as the fuel tanks exploded. Both clocks in the flight deck later showed 3.51 pm exactly on a clear, bright day, a few miles north of the small garrison town of Bahawalpur. 

Precisely five minutes earlier it had lifted off at the start of its 70-minute flight to Islamabad. After some two minutes of terror all on board had the merciful, relief of instantaneous oblivion.
It was 17 August, 1988. Moments before, Hafiz Taj Mohammad, who was walking .towards his field near the village of Dhok Kamal, near the Sutlej River eight miles, north of Bahawalpur, heard the roar of engines and looked up. He watched incredulously as the lumbering plane, which was still rising steadily through,5000 feet, suddenly dropped .its nose to fly almost straight at the ground, before, with some super human effort, it climbed again. Then, as though its strength had finally gone, it plunged down to extinction. To the man below, .there was no outward "reason, no missile, no mid-air explosion, no fire, no engine trailing smoke, nothing to forewarn of such a disaster. 

Dead were the President of Pakistan, General Zia-ul-Haq, and ,the man who might have succeeded him had he survived, General Akhtar Abdul Rahman Khan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. 

Gone were the two most powerful men in Pakistan, the head of state and the man who, for eight years until 1987, had headed the ISI. At a stroke the Afghan resistance fighters, the Mujahideen, had lost their two most influential champions. Dead were the US Ambassador, Mr Arnold Raphel, who had known the President [or twelve years, and Brigadier-General Herbert R Wassom, the US Defense Attache in Islamabad. Dead also were eight Pakistani generals with their staff, and the crew - thirty-one persons in aII.

Disquietingly, neither President Zia nor General Akhtar should have been aboard the plane. Both had been persuaded against their wishes to attend a demonstration of a solitary American M-l battle tank, which the US was keen to sell to the Pakistan Army. It was not a function that required their presence. Such a comparatively low-level event would normally have been handled by the Vice Chief of Army Staff, General Mirza Aslam Beg. It was the first time Zia had left the heavy security of his official residence since he had dismissed the government of Prime Minister Junejo three months before.

It was only on 14 August that Zia had finally given in to the pressure from his former military secretary and Defence Attache in Washington, Major-General Mehmood Durrani, now commanding the armoured division.

He insisted that the President's presence was diplomatically desirable, and would give added weight to the Pakistani delegation. After all Zia had retained the post of Chief of Army Staff. Against his better judgement he agreed to go.

Similarly, General Akhtar had no intention of going to Bahawalpur until a mere twelve hours beforehand. His change of mind was brought about by the persistent phone calls of a former director in 1SI-HQ. The effect that Zia was about to make some controversial changes in the military hierarchy about which Akhtar should know. Akhtar consulted with the President, asking for an urgent meeting. Zia, who was then committed to the tank demonstration trip, suggested Akhtar accompany him as they could discuss things on the aircraft. The fate of both was sealed.
The call sign of the President's plane was PAK I, but the actual aircraft he would use was not selected until shortly before the flight. Usually two of the C-130s based at the Air Force base at Chaklala, a few miles from Islamabad, were earmarked. Then, once the decision was taken, the VIP passenger capsule could be rolled into the aircraft and secured shortly before take-off. This was a 21-foot-long by 8-foot-wide plywood and metal structure weighing 5000 pounds, which was fitted out to give some comfort, including an independent air conditioning and lighting system, to an otherwise notoriously uncomfortable aircraft interior. The second aircraft, PAK 2, would follow PAK 1 as a back Up. There was a routine security search of both planes prior to departure. For this flight there was a problem. The airstrip a1 Bahawalpur was small and could only accommodate one C130, so PAK 2 would land 150 kilometers away at Sargodha. Once the President left Chaklala there was no possibility of his changing aircraft.

There would, however, be two other smaller planes on the airfield. The first was the Cessna whose task was to circle the vicinity of the airport as a precaution against missile-armed terrorists. This had been routine practice since an unsuccessful missile attack six years earlier. 

Then there was the Eight - seater plane of General Beg who, as the official host, had to get to Bahawalpur in advance of the demonstration. The US military attache's small jet that would take him and the ambassador south would be parked at Multan. If the crash was sabotage the two Americans were not part of the target.

The actual demonstration, in front of so much Army brass, was a big embarrassment to the Americans. The much-vaunted Abrams tank failed to score many hits and the billion dollar deal evaporated in the enervating heat.

While the President and the senior officers ate lunch at the officer's mess PAK 1 sat on the tarmac, baking in the sun. An armed military guard was on duty around the aircraft, but there had been a minor fault with a cargo door so the seven crew technicians worked on it. The pilot, Wing Commander Mashood Hassan, who had been personally selected by Zia, together with his co-pilot, navigator and engineer, arrived back at the plane for pre-flight checks in advance of the passengers. These four men would be seated on the elevated flight deck, which was separated from the VIP capsule by a narrow door at the top of three steps, on the left side of the aircraft.
Zia, with his party, arrived at around 3.30 pm, and knelt towards Mecca before saying his farewells. He had persuaded both the senior US officials to join him for the return flight. They did so with no apparent concern.

General Beg made excuses when the President tried to prevail upon him to board PAK 1. He would use his own plane as he had business to attend to at Lahore. It was a known practice of Zia's to fly with the maximum number of top generals or officials to minimize the risks of a sabotage plot. 
Shortly before departure two crates of mangoes arrived for the VIPs, which were loaded in the rear without any check, together with a case of model tanks. Strapped into the sofa and easy chairs inside the VIP capsule were Zia, Akhtar, Afzaal (Chief 'of the General Staff), Raphel, Wassom, and the President's military secretary, Brigadier General Najib Ahmed. Zia, Raphel and Akhtar sat close together so {hey could chat during the flight, although conversation is difficult as the C 130 is an excessively noisy aircraft. 

At 3.46 pm PAK l lifted off after the Cessna security plane reported nothing untoward. On the flight deck the take-off routine had been uneventful, with clear communications to the control tower. The fact that the aircraft lacked either a black box flight recorder or a cockpit voice recorder would later be the subject of censure, but at lift off none of the crew or passengers had the slightest hint of the catastrophe that was little more than two minutes away.

Mashhood gave his arrival time at Islamabad over the radio as the plane pulled up into the sky and began to turn on to its correct course.

On the ground General Beg's pilot was preparing to take off; at Sargodha PAK 2 was airborne, as was the Cessna. All were on the same radio frequency as PAK I, so all heard the ground controller request PAK I's estimated position, and the response, 'Stand by'. Then nothing,' no may-day call, total silence, despite the increasingly frantic calls from the control tower as it was realized that something was radically wrong.

To the passengers the horror of the sickening plunge, with bodies hanging by their safety belts, unable to move, screams drowned by the uninterrupted roar of the engines, was indescribable. Then, the sudden, few fleeting moments of relief as the plane seemingly came under control and started to climb again, with the occupants lolling in the opposite direction or jammed hard back into their seats. But finally, yet another terrifying dive as PAK 1 gave up the struggle to survive.

The Culprits

In judicial terms it was either misadventure or murder. When the news broke, the chances of finding any Pakistani who believed it was an accident were a million to one against. Zia was a man with umpteen enemies. There had been at least six previous attempts at assassination, including a near miss by a missile fired at his plane. Probably his most uncompromising opponents within Pakistan were the Bhutto family. Zia had, despite the international outcry to commute it, confirmed the death sentence on the present Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's father - this, to the man who, as prime minister, had personally picked Zia, then the most junior lieutenant - general, for promotion to Chief of Army Staff over the heads of his seniors. Zulflkar Ali Bhuno had made a decision that, three years later, he would pay for with his head. On 4 April, 1979, he was hanged in Rawalpindi jail. Thereafter the family feud was unrelenting. Zia imprisoned Benazir Bhutto and her mother, banned Bhutto's political party, and had his sons Shah Nawaz and Mir Murtaza convicted of serious crimes in absentia. In exile Mir Murtaza established an anti-Zia terrorist group named Al-Zulfikar (The Sword) in Kabul, where it shared offices with the PLO.

From there, and Damascus, it carried out a campaign of killing and sabotage which, in 1981, included the hijacking of a Pakistan International Airlines passenger jet. Then, in 1985, Shah Nawaz died a painful death in sinister circumstances in Paris, it being rumored that he had been poisoned by Zia's agents. There was, and still is, an implacable hatred between these two families. Benazir Bhutto claimed the crash was 'An act of God', before going on to win the general election three months later, to become Pakistan's first woman prime minister.

Zia was a military man who, along with Akhtar, was the last officer to have been commissioned from the Indian Military Academies just before the partition of India in 1947. Once in politics he would often boast that 'The Armed Forces are my constituency', and he never vacated the post of Chief Of Army Staff that Bhutto had given him. But even within the military he had few friends. He quickly developed an uncanny knack of spotting potential rivals for power. These were removed from the scene by sacking, or posting to positions well away from the political center at Islamabad. His only role as Chief of Army Staff had been to vet the promotions and postings of all officers to the rank of major-general or above. 

Numerous disgruntled Service chiefs were secretly delighted that Zia was dead.

Potential assassins were not restricted to Pakistanis. Ever since Zia had backed the Mujahideen in their struggle against the Soviets and their Afghan allies, Pakistan had been swamped with KHAD agents bent on undermining his government by a terror campaign of bombing civilians. KHAD is the afghan secret police organization, trained and advised by the KGB. At the top of its hit list was President Zia, closely followed by General Akhtar. 

The Soviets were withdrawing from Afghanistan solely because Zia had given sanctuary to the Mujahideen and had, for nine years, been arming, training and advising them in a bloody guerrilla war that had cost the Soviet military 13,000 lives. The USSR blamed Pakistan for continuing to encourage and supply the Mujahideen in their attacks during the withdrawal, which was half-completed at the time of the crash. It had gone so far as to warn Pakistan, through the US Ambassador in Moscow, that it intended to teach Zia a lesson.

Then there was India. Pakistanis and Indians had slaughtered each other on three separate occasions, in 1947, 1965 and 1971. India's Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was convinced that Zia was supplying weapons to Sikh terrorists. They had murdered his mother, and now several thousand armed Sikh insurgents were active in India. Zia was accused of meeting their leaders, and giving shelter and training to the guerrillas inside Pakistan. To counter this, Delhi had established a special branch of its Intelligence Service, with the unpretentious title of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), specifically targeted on Pakistan.

Even the US government shed few genuine tears at Zia's death. It was the State Department's belief that Zia had outlived his usefulness. With the Soviets leaving Afghanistan, the last thing the US wanted was for communist rule in Kabul to be replaced by an Islamic fundamentalist one. American officials were convinced that this was Zia's aim. According to them his dream was an Islamic power block stretching from Iran through Afghanistan to Pakistan with, eventually, the Uzbek, Turkoman and Tajik provinces of the USSR included. To the State Department such a huge area shaded green on the map would be worse than Afghanistan painted red.

On the very day of the disaster the Pakistan Chief of Air Staff ordered a Board of Inquiry set up to inquire into the circumstances of the crash, assess damage and costs, apportion blame (if any) and make recommendations To avoid similar occurrences in the future. Air Commodore Abbas Mirza presided, with three other senior Pakistan Air Force (PAF) officers sitting as members. To provide technicaJ advice and expertise six USAF officers were hurriedly flown from Europe to join the inquiry. They were led by Colonel Daniel Sowada.

For two months the Board deliberated and sifted evidence. Witnesses were inter-viewed , while exhaustive laboratory tests were carried out regarding the aircraft structure, instruments, engines, propellers, and flight controls, both in Pakistan and the USA, with the full cooperation of Lockheed, the aircraft's manufacturers. 

One after another possible causes of the crash were eliminated wIth meticulous care. Crew fitness, fatigue and stress were ruled out. There had been no pilot error. Adverse weather was not a factor, nor was fuel contamination. No inflight fire had occurred prior to impact; the aircraft was structurally intact when it hit the ground; there was no metal fatigue; engines and propellers were functioning normally, as were hydraulic fluid, electrical power and control cables. No evidence of a high-intensity internal explosion was found. Finally, no missile or rocket had been used to down the plane.

The inevitable conclusion - a criminal act of sabotage had killed thirty-one people.

The Board was of the opinion that the crew in the cockpit had been instantaneously and simultaneously incapacitated by the use of a chemical agent such as a fast-working nerve gas. The presence of an odorless and colorless gas would not alarm the crew, so they would not don helmets and masks to breathe oxygen. It was established that none of the flight crew was wearing helmets at the time of the crash. The Board commented that such a chemical agent could have been packed in a small innocuous container such as a drink can, thermos flask or gift parcel, and smuggled onboard without arousing suspicion.

It was not possible to substantiate the type of gas used as 'no proper autopsies on the flight deck crew were carried out. Only the body of Brigadier Wassom was examined before the authorities at the military hospital at Bahawalpur were ordered not to perform autopsies. He had been in the VIP capsule, not on the flight deck, and all that could be deduced was that he had not suffered injuries from any explosion prior to impact. Neither had he breathed in any toxic fumes, as would have been the case with a fire before the plane hit the ground. 

The instructions not to perform autopsies came as a shock, as it was a routine procedure. Later, it was stated that all the bodies had been completely destroyed in the fire, rendering autopsies impossible. When General Akhtar's family wanted to see his body before burial, they were refused, on the grounds that it was totally disintegrated, with nothing of any substance left.

This reason was not believed. Witnesses at the crash site said that, while the passengers at the rear of the aircraft were virtually totally destroyed, this was not the case with the senior officers in the capsule or the crew in the cockpit. The condition of Wassom's body did not prevent thorough examination. Zia's Holy Koran survived, charred but easily recognizable, as did Akhtar's uniform cap, together with his personal file cover with its crest, and the words 'CHAIRMAN JCSC' still clearly readable. A US official was to announce that the bodies were not available for autopsy as Muslim custom requires burial within 24 hours. 

While this is true in normal circumstances, it never applies within the Services, as shown by the Army medical staff at Bahawalpur .when they automatically made preparations to proceed.
The Board had no members qualified to undertake criminal investigations, but they did record that, 'although 31 death certificates have been received no physical body count was carried out at the wreckage site or in the hospital.

The possibility of someone not boarding the aircraft at Bahawalpur cannot be ruled out.
Although the lSI was initially tasked with investigations, its efforts appeared less than enthusiastic. Service personnel at Bahawalpur were surprised that they were not subjected to rigorous interrogation. The discovery of a murdered policeman nearby was not successfully investigated, while the efforts of interrogators to extract a confession from the pilot of PAK 2 were bizarre, as well as unrewarding. A recent killing of a Shiite leader had been blamed by his followers on Zia. Both the pilot of PAK 2 and co-pilot of PAK 1, Flight Lieutenant Sajid, were Shiites, so it was suggested that the PAK 2 pilot had persuaded Sajid deliberately to crash the plane in a suicide mission. Only when the Board of Inquiry showed that such actions would have been physically impossible was the unfortunate man released.

So it was an act of mass murder. The likely method was pinpointed by the Board, although the culprits remained unidentified. As explained above, many people, organizations, even nations, had powerful personal or political motives for wanting Zia removed?

What have gone before are the facts as far as I have been able to ascertain them; what follows are my own comments on how it might have been done.

First, I will deal with the point sometimes made that the violent roller-coaster movements of the aircraft indicated a last despairing attempt by somebody to fly the plane. If it had been a crew member he would certainly have shouted some warning over the radio, but there was absolute silence. Assuredly the crew was incapacitated. Afterwards it was suggested that the voice of Brigadier Najib Ahmed had been heard calling out to the captain, and that he had managed to get into the cockpit where his cries had been picked up on the radio as the pilot's hand was still locked to the switch.

One version of this theory has Najib actually trying to control the aircraft. I believe this is nonsensical. Once PAK I got out of control there was no way anybody could physically leave his seat and struggle forward, climb the steps, open the door and get onto the flight deck. Finally, there is no mention of anyone hearing Ahmed's voice in the Board of Inquiry's report. Had such a thing happened it would have been there. The erratic climbing and plunging has another explanation. 

According to a Lockheed C-130 expert, if this type of aircraft flies unattended its nose rises steeply, a mechanism in the tail reverses this and the plane dives. The plane over-corrects, again with the same results. This might occur several times before a crash. The technical term for this pattern is 'phugoid'.

I believe the primary aim was to assassinate Zia. The original plan may have been to murder Akhtar as well, and at the same lime, but I doubt it. It was really asking a lot to kill them simultaneously. Akhtar was detested by many senior officers, he was near the top of KHAD's hit list, and he was assumed by many to be ready to step into Zia's position if he died. Perhaps it was part of the plot to get him on board PAK 1 that afternoon, but if so it was a very last-minute arrangement.

On balance I feel his death was probably regarded as an unexpected bonus by the killers.
Certainly the use of a plane crash was selected as the means because the chances of evidence to incriminate the plotters surviving would be minimal, even if it was later established as sabotage. The use of ultra-sophisticated poison gas, capable of killing four crew members simultaneously, points to the involvement of at least one intelligence agency. The problem would be the source of the gas. Pakistan would be unlikely to have it, but the KGB and CIA would surely have access. Both KHAD and RAW could have obtained it through their Soviet contacts. 

If the conspirators were among the Pakistan military then it is conceivable that the CIA could have supplied it, albeit for another purpose. Also highly probable is the involvement of the Pakistan military, certainly at comparatively junior level, probably at senior as well. 
Neither the KGB nor KHAD or RAW could have halted the autopsies at a military hospital. With military involvement, the obtaining of the President's flight schedule becomes comparatively simple, as does getting around security at airports, and the actual planting of the device inside an aircraft.

The planners must have been getting desperate as week after week passed without Zia showing any inclination to use his plane. The tank demonstration was not likely to interest him without considerable persuasion, and was probably used as a last resort. The problem was to convince him to go without making him suspicious. Quite possibly somebody convinced General Durrani, the tank division commander, that Zia's attendance would add to the importance of the event, and was in Durrani's own interests. His subsequent success in inducing the President to go could have been entirely innocent.

We must assume that the lethal gas device had already been obtained while awaiting an opportunity and the person destined to plant it given his instructions. He was undoubtedly in the military, probably a technician within the Air Force, possibly, if my theory is correct, from No. 6 Squadron PAF. This is the unit that operates the C-130 transports out of Chaklala, a few miles south of Islamabad. A decision had to be taken as to when to plant the gas. Once it was confirmed that Zia would fly to Bahawalpur the choice laid between doing it there or at Chaklala, when it was clear exactly which aircraft would be PAK 1.

Most theories suggest the planting of the device was done at Bahawalpur, but I believe it much more likely to have been Chaklala. At Bahawalpur there would be no Air Force personnel except the crew, so none of them would do it - unless they were willing to go down with the plane. How could the plotters be sure an Army man could get on the guarded aircraft? The device had to be put in the cockpit which involved climbing up the steps, through the door, on to the flight deck. This was virtually impossible for a soldier, and certainly did not happen with the mango delivery. The crew working on the cargo door perhaps? But they were to fly back to Islamabad. Neither they nor the security guard would allow a soldier or civilian into the aircraft, let alone go climbing up into the cockpit. I cannot say with absolute certainty it was not done at Bahawalpur, but if it was it was a highly risky operation with the odds against success.

At Chaklala an intelligence agency would have an easier task in infiltrating the permanent Air Force staff. Access to the C130s was part of the everyday duties of the technical or maintenance personnel. A perfect opportunity occurred when the VIP capsule was rolled up inside PAK I. It identified the aircraft and, with the bustle of activity in strapping il to the floor and pre-flight checks, nobody would have questioned anybody going into the cockpit, perhaps changing a fire extinguisher or inserting the device in an air-vent. If the sabotage was carried out al Chaklala then it would have needed two devices to set it off - a timer and an altitude device. The timer would be set to activate the altitude switch. With the former a four-hour time lapse would be safe, allowing for one hour before the plane took off, just over an hour's flight, and then as PAK I sat on the strip at Bahawalpur the altitude device would be armed. All that was needed would be the climb to the required height, then inside the cockpit the deadly gas would escape. If Chaklala was the scene of the sabotage then it was a double-arming device that was used, otherwise PAK I would have crashed only after take-off and suspicion would have been focused on the Air Force base personnel.

The plot worked flawlessly, except for one major calamity: both the US Ambassador and the military attache died. Certainly, whoever carried out this multiple murder had not intended these two senior Americans to be among the victims. There was no way of knowing that Zia would invite them to join him for the journey at the last minute.

The conspirators were appalled. They anticipated the most thorough, penetrating and wideranging investigation which would undoubtedly uncover their identities. It never happened. The final phase of this merciless terrorist act was the US coverup.

The Cover-up

The State Department would have much preferred an accident, some sort of technical failure, pilot error, anything rather than sabotage. If it was a murder of two high-ranking US officials then the American public would expect, indeed demand, to know the culprits. For such an outrageous act of terrorism the outcry against the perpetrators would be loud and long. The government would probably find it impossible to silence the clamor to exact retribution.

Depending on who had done it, exposure could mean the ruin of US policy objectives in the area, and elsewhere in the' world. Supposing the KGB, or their surrogates in KHAD, were responsible, how would revealing the USSR as the organizer of mass murder, of the assassination of a head of state, affect the build-up of goodwill between East and West? How could the US avoid a major outbreak of hostility between themselves and the USSR? Almost certainly the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan would be reversed. The implications of Moscow being to blame were un nerving.
Similarly, the dilemma was almost as serious if the plotters were within the Pakistan military. If investigation uncovered a clique of anti-Zia generals the American people would be outraged that, after all these years of massive support to the Pakistan Armed Forces and the Mujahideen, they had killed a US ambassador and a brigadier-general. It would be futile to say they hadn't intended to.US-Pakistan relations would be in ruins. Aid would have to be curtailed, the military might be forced into prolonged presidential rule, the democratic elections scheduled for November would be abandoned, and with them the prospect of the more acceptably moderate Benazir Bhutto becoming prime minister.

As I have said earlier, the US was not sorry to see Zia go. The State Department was happy to see the Soviets out of Afghanistan, but decidedly unhappy with the likelihood of, as the US perceived it, Zia-backed fundamentalists taking over in Kabul. Nor did it like his determination to have nuclear weapons. By mid-1988 Zia was becoming a liability rather than an asset to the US.
Though unlikely, it was conceivable that some minor political faction or terrorist group, like AI-Zulftkar, had somehow achieved the impossible. The problem was, once serious investigations started there was no knowing what un welcome worms might emerge from the can if the lid was lifted.

Testifying before the House of Representatives Judiciary Sub-Committee on Crime in June, 1989, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage justified the lack of any serious investigations into the sabotage by claiming, [we were] hopefully moving Pakistan in a more democratic manner ". The military in Pakistan as well as their presidency just being decapitated, we were very alarmed there might be some backsliding'. In other words they were quite prepared to write off Ambassador Raphel's and Brigadier Wassom's murders if that meant not rocking the boat.
None of this soul-searching would have been necessary if no Americans had died - particularly such senior ones. The whole business was complicated by the fact that as recently as 1986 Congress had passed a law that gave the FBI the legal right, indeed the duty to inquire into terrorist acts overseas that involved attacks on US citizens. It is often referred to as the 'Long Arm' law.

The State Department did four things immediately after the crash which, taken together, point unerringly at a cover-up. First, within hours, it sent a team of purely technical air force advisers to assist the PAF Board of Inquiry.

Secondly, it did not insist, through its embassy, on autopsies on the bodies of the victims, particularly the crew, but rather allowed them to be buried knowing that essential evidence as to how the crash was caused was being buried with them. 

Thirdly, it sent a Deputy National Security Adviser, Robert Oakley, to take over Raphel's post. He could be relied upon to sit on the lid of the can. Later, in June, 1989, he told a highly skeptical sub-committee that when he attended the National Security Council meeting to decide on the US response to the crash, he simply forgot all about the 'Long Arm' law. This, despite the fact that he had personally lobbied hard to get it passed. 

Fourthly, and most importantly, it vetoed the FBI's request to go to Pakistan. Oliver Revell, FBI's Assistant Director had requested clearance and on 21 August had been given it verbally, but, within hours, it had been withdrawn, probably on the instructions of Oakley, who was by then in Islamabad.

General Beg, who had just avoided dying with his President, had circled the burning wreckage in his own aircraft before flying straight to Islamabad. There troops were alerted, key points protected, and a crisis cabinet meeting called. But there was no military takeover. Beg accepted immediate promotion to Zia's, old post of Army Chief of Staff, while the civilian chairman of the Senate, the 73-year-old Ghulam Ishaq Khan, took over as head of the interim government. The November election would go ahead.

Almost certainly the military authority that halted the autopsies will never be named, nor will the details of the collusion that must have taken place so swiftly between the Pakistani authorities and the US Embassy in Islamabad. It was not until ten months later that congressional pressure finally forced the State Department to allow three FBI investigators to go to Pakistan. As Congressman Bill McCollum (R. Fla.) said, 'At this late date, can the FBI find out what actually happened in Pakistan? I don't know. But we intend to find out what happened at the State Department. The FBI team seemingly lacked enthusiasm for the task. It was reported that 'awkward ' questions were not asked; the agents appeared disinclined to investigate evidence that conflicted with the statement that the bodies were too badly burned to permit autopsies and, with their schedule arranged by the Bhutto government, were apparently more interested in sightseeing than cross-questioning witnesses. According to a Washington Times source they only left Islamabad for tourist trips. Their attitude made it quite clear that they were following instructions not to stir the pot.

There was much hypocrisy in high places at the funeral on 20 August, 1988. India had sent its President and declared national mourning at home, the Russian Ambassador laid a wreath with solemn ceremonial, while US Secretary of State George Schultz called Zia a 'martyr' and assured the Mujahideen fundamentalist Leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, that the US would do all it could to ensure their success in freeing Afghanistan. The funeral had both a military and an Islamic flavor. Hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis gathered near the gold-plated Faisal Mosque to watch the coffin, covered in the national flag and flowers, and carried on the shoulders of soldiers, arrive for the final rites. Prayers were followed by the measured boom of a 21-gun salute.

There was genuine sorrow and foreboding among the three million Afghan refugees encamped just inside the Pakistan border. There was a great sense of loss among the Mujahideen, for Zia and Akhtar had been the architects of their successes in the field. Now, with the Soviets withdrawing, with victory in sight, continued, uninterrupted support would be indispensable for the final push to Kabul. As the reader will discover the Mujahideen were to be bitterly disappointed.

From the Bear Trap.

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## Kyusuibu Honbu



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## Infinity

I this was work of KGB


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## TaimiKhan

Infinity said:


> I this was work of KGB



KGB could not have been able to infiltrate so much, this was the work of someone whom we already knew.

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## Cr.7

That was a suggestion because of the rivalry between the two countries in that time-_-


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## xyxmt

One thing i know for certain, "IT WASNT ME"


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## Leader

the guy with peanut trees did it


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## asad71

1. Such an enterprise would require collusion of several Intel agencies and people withing Pakistan establishment. But there must be a lead agency. I seem to think that would be Mossad. My reasons:

a. It was known that Pakistan was already nuclear, and Zia was pushing ahead with further developments and acquisition of delivery systems.
b. Zia and Akhtar had visioned an Islamic upsurge to sweep into Central Asia. 

2. Zia had thrown out several people suspected to be Mossad operatives. One was a Col in IDF locating himself in Pak-Afghan border supplying arms to the Mujahedeen. Another was journalist/writer Luis Lusfwithch who has the record of being thrown out also from India and BD. (He re-enterd Pakistan during Mush regime, married a Pakistani girl who wads a teacher in Beacon-hill Scool and was back to whatever he was trained to do. He was engaged by BAL to come to Dhaka and testify in Mujib killing cases.) Of all Zionists were the ones most concerned about Zia's future plans. Khad and KGB could not have mustered more than a dying kick. Mossad would possibly have used al-Zulfiqar and their Syrian contacts. I would discount RAW because during Zia days Indian Intel had been totally kept in check by Zia's Counter Intel. CIA definitely yes, and this they have made obvious by their post-accident actions.

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## XTREME

Apne Ullu - Shehzad Roy

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## third eye

Wonder how many have read A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohd Hanif

The book meanders around often in jest but does provide clues as well.

How old is this book The Bear Trap ? I recall reading a book with a similar or near similar name years ago.

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## Amolthebest

Nice read. One theory suggests that there is possibility of US hand in the incident. But why US would killed their own ambassador for that. Isnt it!

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## pak-marine

its obvious this was jointly conducted by amriki cia and apni isi .. Gen Baigs name keep popping up in the $hittiest incidences involving PA his 2nd act was years later mehran bank scandal - another question arises IF the cia was involved there as well ?? If yes why would they??

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## jha

pak-marine said:


> its obvious this was jointly conducted by amriki cia and apni isi .. Gen Baigs name keep popping up in the $hittiest incidences involving PA his 2nd act was years later mehran bank scandal - another question arises IF the cia was involved there as well ?? If yes why would they??



Real question is whether an ambassador can be sacrificed ...? This is something which makes CIA involvement a little doubtful.
ISI ( or, atleast someone important from it ) must be involved. KGB cant be ruled out.

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## fatman17

jha said:


> Real question is whether an ambassador can be sacrificed ...? This is something which makes CIA involvement a little doubtful.
> ISI ( or, atleast someone important from it ) must be involved. KGB cant be ruled out.



the american ambassador was a last minute invite by zia. the plan was already in motion. i guess i can see where you are coming from. its difficult for u to digest that america/cia have their share of dirty tricks and countless overthrows of democratic countries. history is replete with such examples.

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## pak-marine

jha said:


> Real question is whether an ambassador can be sacrificed ...? This is something which makes CIA involvement a little doubtful.
> ISI ( or, atleast someone important from it ) must be involved. KGB cant be ruled out.



zia & gen akhtar were naturally paranoid about assassination attempts - like they were persuaded to attend the tank demo .. zia as a gurantee persuaded the amrikis to ensure there are no attempts on him by any parties so he gathered up max no of people just to fly safe also there was no way of knowing or stopping. The amrikis had their own plane if they were not part of the plot probably have hitched a ride from some one in Islamabad ? and lastly why cant a ambasador be sacrificed it was a small cost as if zia would have been there the entire region would have turned into a huge islamic union .. the nightmare was there yar , how difficult it is ...

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## RazPaK

It was not the KGB. It was the CIA.

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## KingMamba

jha said:


> Real question is whether an ambassador can be sacrificed ...? This is something which makes CIA involvement a little doubtful.
> ISI ( or, atleast someone important from it ) must be involved. KGB cant be ruled out.



They didn't know Zia would have invited the ambassador onto his plane. That was never factored in. Article clearly points to that as well.



RazPaK said:


> It was not the KGB. It was the CIA.



I whole heartily agree. You have to believe the Zionists had a hand in this as well. They never wanted a nuclear Pakistan and Zia wasn't going to stop there.

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## Amolthebest

Or was the ambassador had become so pro zia and became burden for national interest?

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## Solomon2

KingMamba93 said:


> I whole heartily agree. You have to believe the Zionists had a hand in this as well.


As far as I know the relationship between Zia and "the Zionists" was one-way: he gave the orders and the Israelis obeyed. I think he was the only general of a Muslim country - certainly he was the first - to command Israeli troops in joint operations. (_see_ Black September.)

Everything I've read so far emphasizes that from the beginning of Pakistan's nuclear program it was a U.S. concern as the U.S. didn't want to encourage nuclear proliferation.

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## KingMamba

Solomon2 said:


> As far as I know the relationship between Zia and "the Zionists" was one-way: he gave the orders and the Israelis obeyed. I think he was the only general of a Muslim country - certainly he was the first - to command Israeli troops in joint operations. (_see_ Black September.)
> 
> Everything I've read so far emphasizes that from the beginning of Pakistan's nuclear program it was a U.S. concern as the U.S. didn't want to encourage nuclear proliferation.



True he definitively has a positive relationship especially with Mossad but that was for as long as he was useful. Once the soviets were repelled in Afghanistan he was of no more use and had once again become a threat especially if the plans stated in this excerpt of him wanting to create an Islamic Union was true.

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## RazPaK

Zia was the only leader in the Muslim world that would not take **** from anyone, whether they were Islamists, or not. People feared him, and all the leaders around the world loved him. 


He is also a distant relative of mine.

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## Amolthebest

RazPaK said:


> Zia was the only leader in the Muslim world that would not take **** from anyone, whether they were Islamists, or not. People feared him, and all the leaders around the world loved him.
> 
> 
> He is also a distant relative of mine.



Sorry to burst your bubble but you lost Siachin war in his tenure. He didnt had th capacities to overcome giant named India. Yes Mushy had those capabilities. But in Kargil he lost it too. Zia was one of the worst leaders of Pakistan.

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## RazPaK

Amolthebest said:


> Sorry to burst your bubble but you lost Siachin war in his tenure. He didnt had th capacities to overcome giant named India. Yes Mushy had those capabilities. But in Kargil he lost it too. Zia was one of the worst leaders of Pakistan.


You'r not even a Pakistani.

Zia had enough momentum to be one the greatest leaders in the world. If he was alive and gained enough support, India would have been in serious trouble. 


Now If you want to turn into a Jingo, do me a favour, and don't respond to me.

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## Peaceful Civilian

Amolthebest said:


> Nice read. One theory suggests that there is possibility of US hand in the incident. But why US would killed their own ambassador for that. Isnt it!


Zia ul Haq killed the leader of PPP, *Bhutto*.
PPP just took revenge with the help of some foreign country/weapon.
Do you believe that PPP jialas would keep quit after hard suffering, In jails, and punishment under the Bloody dictatorship of Zia ul Haq.

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## RazPaK

Peaceful Civlian said:


> Zia ul Haq killed the leader of PPP, *Bhutto*.
> PPP just took revenge with the help of some foreign country/weapon.
> Do you believe that PPP jialas would keep quit after hard suffering, In jails, and punishment under the Bloody dictatorship of Zia ul Haq.



Bhutto was a dog and a traitor and deserved what he got.

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## Peaceful Civilian

RazPaK said:


> Bhutto was a dog and a traitor and deserved what he got.


offtopic 
Yar here everybody is dog. From Rairhi wala till the leader.
Look the prices of fruits and chicken.
And they says Holy Ramdan while everybody is busy for Stock in Illegal warehouses.
From same money they will perform Hajj

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## jha

fatman17 said:


> the american ambassador was a last minute invite by zia. the plan was already in motion. i guess i can see where you are coming from. its difficult for u to digest that america/cia have their share of dirty tricks and countless overthrows of democratic countries. history is replete with such examples.



Not at all.. I have no particular liking for America. I come from a socialist family. And I do know a little about the dirty deeds of CIA...

What I asked was an honest query.

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## Dance

RazPaK said:


> Bhutto was a dog and a traitor and deserved what he got.



I dislike Bhutto and he is a reason for a lot of our problems. 

But by killing him like that gave PPP the power to use the "shaheed" slogan and the have milked it ever since to win elections. It would have been better to let him finish his term and maybe after seeing what a bad leader he was, PPP would have been finished back then rather than now.

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## RazPaK

Dance said:


> I dislike Bhutto and he is a reason for a lot of our problems.
> 
> But by killing him like that gave PPP the power to use the "shaheed" slogan and the have milked it ever since to win elections. It would have been better to let him finish his term and maybe after seeing what a bad leader he was, PPP would have been finished back then rather than now.



He is the biggest traitor in our history. He was the reason our country broke into half. He deserved to be hanged.

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## Peaceful Civilian

RazPaK said:


> He is the biggest traitor in our history. He was the reason our country broke into half. He deserved to be hanged.


At-least yar thanks to him. Due to him, our 90,000 soldiers returned back. It was shameless incident in the history of Books when 90,000 our soldier dropped guns. At least they should get Shahadat for the country. 
But on the other side Bhutto was brave than soldier. He gave sacrifice. Guess who was brave?? 
Truth may be bitter for you and yes it hurts when we see 1971.

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## Dance

RazPaK said:


> He is the biggest traitor in our history. He was the reason our country broke into half. He deserved to be hanged.



He's was just one of the many traitors in Pakistan. (He wasn't the sole reason for 1971 though)

But like I said his death made PPP the most popular political party for quite a while. Zia's rule just made him even more popular.

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## A1Kaid

RazPaK said:


> You'r not even a Pakistani.
> 
> Zia had enough momentum to be one the greatest leaders in the world. If he was alive and gained enough support, India would have been in serious trouble.
> 
> 
> Now If you want to turn into a Jingo, do me a favour, and don't respond to me.



You think too highly of Gen. Zia...



Peaceful Civlian said:


> At-least yar thanks to him. Due to him, *our 90,000 soldiers* returned back. It was shameless incident in the history of Books when 90,000 our soldier dropped guns. At least they should get Shahadat for the country.
> But on the other side Bhutto was brave than soldier. He gave sacrifice. Guess who was brave??
> Truth may be bitter for you and yes it hurts when we see 1971.



It wasn't 90,000 soldiers, it was ~90,000 POWs, many of whom were civilian personnel employed by the Pakistani Government. Pakistan did not even have nearly ~90,000 soldiers deployed in East Pakistan. Sources I've read estimate roughly ~50-55 thousand Army personnel were present during the war in East Pakistan, in addition to Naval, and Air Force.

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## S_O_C_O_M

Pakistanis are animals and Gen. Zia Ul Haq was the perfect leader of Pakistan because he was able keep everyone within their bounds.

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## Last Hope

Here is a book written by 'Mustafa Kamal Pasha' giving a well detailed story-line and ending, rising quite interesting questions too.
It is worth reading.

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## sur

RazPaK said:


> He is the biggest traitor in our history. He was the reason our country broke into half. He deserved to be hanged.


Another horrendous damage that Zulfikar-Bhutto did to Pakistan was nationalizing institutions ,,, that acted as a reverse-gear for Pakistan's economy.

Same with Bainazeer,,, before coming back to Pakistan , she gave a statement that she will let Nato act inside Pakistan if she became PM again ,,, when I read this in news paper, i literally prayed to God that may she die,,, my prayers were heard,,, BUT, even bigger criminal Zardari took over. Then I said to myself that instead of praying for her death I should have prayed for whatever was good for Pakistan ...

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## Last Hope

Sur,

That is a horrible thing to say. You should never make such comments, especially for dead. I personally do not have any respect for her and her father, who have done greater damage to Pakistan in long run. 

Dance,

General Zia was not the biggest traitor for Pakistan. I have neutral views for him. He has done several positive things for Pakistan and during his era the world bowed to Pakistan _(for personal reasons though)._ But once again looking into history, none of the presidents of Pakistan were good enough and have committed mistakes they should not have done. If it were not for the NRO, Musharraf would have been most successful ruler of Pakistan. 


The topic is not Zia-ul-Haq VS Zulfiqar Bhutto. So please refrain from posting such harsh comments to each other.



RazPaK said:


> It was not the KGB. It was the CIA.



Right after the crash, a team of FBI investigators was ready to got to Pakistan but last minute orders _'from top'_ stopped them leaving them wandering why. The book I mentioned has details with names of chief of the team and dates which I cannot recall now. The team leader tried to persuade the 'top brass' to allow them to leave for Pakistan yet in vein. After increasing pressure from UN and the world, the FBI team was sent to Pakistan which returned after two weeks. They were given orders not to do anything and have a sigh-seeing tour of Pakistan. 

ISI and PAF intelligence started working on their own accords and latter, much latter, FBI joined in. It was well planned. Despite claims by some member, ISI was NOT involved officially albeit Pakistani military officials were bribed out. PPP was also involved ans Benazir tried to limit the investigation by all possible means. 

This was a joint plan by CIA and PPP. Benazir wanted to avenge her father's death whereas CIA has many reasons.

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## Mav3rick

RazPaK said:


> He is the biggest traitor in our history. He was the reason our country broke into half. He deserved to be hanged.


 
Bhutto did have his ups and downs. Maybe his downs were more then his ups.


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## Peaceful Civilian

miss said:


> you are a punjabbi, suni obviuosly you will dislike a sindi shya ruler.
> he was the reason your country didnt break in to 4 and zia is the reason of the islmization and other evils in your country


I don't like Zia, He was traitor, but Pakistan had no choice because Pakistan was next target for Russia. So Pakistanis also fought war with our allies U.S.A and other countries and defeated Soviet union. and Israeli also provided weapons to Pakistan.
The Soviet intervention strengthened the complex relations of Israel and Pakistan.According to Charlie Wilson's reference, Israel proliferated the sensitive and advance weapon technology to Pakistan, while reverse engineered the Soviet weapons after Israel had confiscated from PLO during the Lebanon war, and channeled these weapons to Mujahedin.
But after years , some of these Mujhadin are brainwashed about Jihad and Now they are headache for U,S,A and Pakistan as well.
Zia ul haq was also hard line Islamist and he is also responsible for unrest in Pakistan and fight b/w shia and sunni and other firqas from his time.

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## Fracker

Peaceful Civlian said:


> I don't like Zia, He was traitor, but Pakistan had no choice because Pakistan was next target for Russia. So Pakistanis also fought war with our allies U.S.A and other countries and defeated Soviet union. and Israeli also provided weapons to Pakistan.
> The Soviet intervention strengthened the complex relations of Israel and Pakistan.According to Charlie Wilson's reference, Israel proliferated the sensitive and advance weapon technology to Pakistan, while reverse engineered the Soviet weapons after Israel had confiscated from PLO during the Lebanon war, and channeled these weapons to Mujahedin.
> But after years , some of these Mujhadin are brainwashed about Jihad and Now they are headache for U,S,A and Pakistan as well.
> Zia ul haq was also hard line Islamist and he is also responsible for unrest in Pakistan and fight b/w shia and sunni and other firqas from his time.



Sorry to disagree with you.. He put balance between Shia and sunni with hock or crock.. to make them in order. He was the perfect leader for pakistan, since no body could do anything infront of him. He was the one who was thinking about Islamic block, where Iran would have been also part. So naturally he was neither against Shia or Sunni. Shia become in fire because most of them were supporting Bhutto, and PPP used them for their purpose and spread hatred in Shia's Mind. As i say normally, politicians can do anything just to come into the power which is why Democracy is the mess, especially for Pakistan.

Today he is no more but he was the perfect leader for Pakistan and Pakistani Muslims. It was planed by the people who put Model of faulty Tank inside the plan. and no other then CIA and PPP who were involved and used influence to subtage the investigations.

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## Pksecurity

Please read: Who killed the most powerful military dictator?


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## SEAL

Zia was pathetic military dictator and became victim of his own dirty work same is the case with commando mush lol how many times he promised to return to Pak but still outside today Pakistan is in crises because of these two dogs.

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## Pksecurity

fox said:


> today Pakistan is in crises because of these two dogs.



Do you seriously think so?

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## sanddy

While reading about him on wiki i found a external like of this cartoon





Can someone translate it in english ???


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## S.A.

Off topic: Zia was a good controler, I repeat "controler". He knew how to balance the see-saw. Now people will say that he bring Islamist. For them, please see who bring the word "Islamic Republic of Pakistan" in constitution. And hence, I assume Islamic Republic should be Islamic.

On Topic: I read that A.Q. Khan alleged pilot of the aircraft (Mashood If I am right) to be the defect in his interview.

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## aanshu001

pakistanitarzan said:


> Ok I SWEAR to God. My God strike me dead if i am lying on purpose. Mark my words, I know the truth! Please don't be surprised. You ask who killed Zia Ul Haq? Im gonna answer this question for you. Here we go, are you ready? Alright, airplane crash killed him



do u aslo why plane was crashed....


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## pakistanitarzan

aanshu001 said:


> do u aslo why plane was crashed....



Ofcourse, it could not afford to be airborne


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## Mav3rick

fox said:


> Zia was pathetic military dictator and became victim of his own dirty work same is the case with commando mush lol how many times he promised to return to Pak but still outside today Pakistan is in crises because of these two dogs.


 
And I think the crisis in Pakistan is because of people like you, who have absolutely no idea who is good for the country and who is bad. I guess in this case, ignorance is worse then incompetence.

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## ajtr

> Who Killed Gen. Zia Ul Haq


Its not tricky question to answer..

Its the will of Allah(swt) who killed him None can kill a living thing unless Allah(swt) wishes.others can be just the reason in carrying out his will.


> To be a Muslim it is essential to believe in the destiny, whether good or bad, that Allah has set for us (known as Qadr in Arabic). The Quran says:*
> 
> "Say, Nothing shall befall us save that which Allah has ordained for us"*
> This however does not mean that man does not have free will, for if he did not Allah's justice would be compromised for you cannot judge a person if he does not have the freedom of choosing what he does. Allah, the 'Just', has given man both destiny and free will, the action of a human is interrelated with destiny and both are mutually necessary, as Imam Ali son of Abi Talib (AS) said:
> *"The predestined will of Allah and the action of a human are like the spirit and the body, the spirit without the body has no physicality and the body without the soul is a picture without movement. If the two are adjoined they become like Al-Qadr and action, for if there was no Qadr then you would not know the difference between creation and creator, and if there was action without it being willed and predestined by Allah than it would not happen."
> Some things such as our deaths and disease are above human will, no matter what a person does, if for instance God has set the hour at which you are to die than it will be so:
> "And no soul can die except by Allah's leave- a decree with a fixed term" Holy Quran 3:146
> "They say 'If we had any part in the government of affairs, we should not have been killed here.' Say 'If you had remained in your homes, surely those on whom fighting had been enjoyed would have gone forth to their deathbeds." Holy Quran 3:155

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## no_koadsheding_plz

whoever killed him .. did an awesome and much needed job .. Zia was a scum bag dictator who plunged tho whole nation into the current dark ages .. by bringing his own crooked version of islamic rule ... i hate BB aand zordari etc but to me ZAB was the real ,man who realy wished Pakistan to become a great modern secular independant and progresssive state .. ia on the otherhand brough about talibanization , klashnikovs,extremmisimn,.

may Zia ul Haq rot in hell ..

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## Abu Zolfiqar

funny this topic was posted

I was in Dallas Texas recently to visit some relatives -- they gave me the book which was sitting on their desk....i literally just started reading the book 3 days ago...reads like a thriller, many interesting insights.


Gen. Zia obviously had many enemies as did the DG ISI -- goes without saying. The use of a poison gas could explain why there was no mayday signal to ATC 

multiple theories exist.....we may never know the exact truth, only Allah knows


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## Haseebullah

I heard a theory of the co-pilot shouting to the pilot"Mashood bhai aap kia kar rahe hain?"
But i guess this topic will remain a detective novel without a finish!


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## FaujHistorian

.....


We can view the death of Gen. Zia in many many different ways. And every path we take could potentially end up in a conspiracy theory. 

However one such theory makes more sense than the rest. 

Before we discuss this theory, we must move away from Gen. Zia and look at the way top Generals of Pak army have met their maker in the last 30+ years. 

Before the assassination of Gen. Zia, for ordinary Pakistani and for ordinary jawan, a general was a mini-god. These Jawans and the ordinary Pakistanis saw an aura around the top generals. 

Boys wanted to be a general, and girls wanted to marry one. This was the culture dominating the Pakistani military's heartland that mainly consists of Punjab and KPK. 

Us the Urdu speakers had a different view but that's not relevant. At least not in this post. 


Two major events shattered that aura. One from outside, and one from within (well mostly from within but some outside help as well).

The first event was the defeat in 1971. The Vietnam of Pakistan, a catastrophe that still looms large in the depth of Pakistan's psyche especially the psyche of military's heartland of Pakistan aka Punjab and KPK. Ordinary people realized that top generals and officers could be captured by our greatest enemy and held in prisons for a long long time. With Akashwani the enemy radio transmitting daily the "messages" from prison "I am Major so and so from Regiment XYZ, and I am in Indian jail, and I am OK". While it united Pakistanis in their anger and hate against the big foe, it also made them realize that army may not be the ultimate savior in their mortal struggle against India. 


The second major event was the victory against Commie Russia, that could have reinstated the mini-god status of Pak generals but it didn't. Why because the victory was not claimed by the Pak army jawans and officers, instead such claims went straight into the pockets of Islamist Jihadis and much more importantly into the pockets of gulf Arab fighters. Ordinary people couldn't see that without training and logistical support of Pak army, without the money from Gulf, and without money and weapons and latest tech from America, their Jihad would have been kapoot very very quickly. But who cares about the military strategy and details when Islamism is in vogue. 

Thus for all the wrong reasons, Jihadis and their Arab handlers took on the God like stature as they and only they could have defeated mighty Soviets in the past, and they and only they would be able to defeat other enemies of the future. 

And who can question the ease with which they could identify a long list of enemies starting with big so-called satan America, and mini devils like Israel the occupier of Palestine, India the occupier of Kashmir, the occupier of chechnya, China the occupier of xinjiang and the list went on and on and on. 

The only thing they needed was a strong base like Pakistan, and they were ready to go 100 miles an hour blazing through America, Israel, and anywhere their brand of Islam was perceived by them to be under threat. 

In front of these Arab-gods, Pakistani generals were the puny bumbling idiots who didn't know how to help with Islamist cause. 

There were exceptions though. Many Generals, lower level officers and many more jawans bought this Arab-god-general theories. Hameeda-bulbul aka Hamid Gul, Col. Imam, etc. formed this large group of Islamist visionaries. 

These visionaries considered all the established generals to be seculars, pro-West, pro-Pakistan-nationalists, and thus a roadblock in their journey of conquests in the name of Islamism.

The very first road block was none other than Zia ul Haq and waiting in the wings was an Islamist general Aslam Baig an Urdu speaking who had stronger "faith" than his Punjabi and Pashtun counterparts. 

And so was the plan put in place by the Gulf-Arab-gods to get rid of this pesky Zia-ul Haq with the inside help from multiple layers of Pak army officers and jawans. 

Later assassinations of Gen. Asif, two HUGE but unsucessful attempts on Gen. Musharraf, murders of other generals and attempted murders on yet more, clearly show that Pak army has been infected by the Islamist bug and any general who stepped out of line was put on the hit list. 


Since the unsucessful attempts on Gen. Musharraf, Pak army has been cleansing itself. 

But it is a tough task. The real guards are the jawans and JCOs. If they go Islamist, there is no defense against them. 

Remember how Sikhs in large numbers went religious during Indira Gandhi's time and the result was assassination of one of the most powerful women in the world at the hands of her own guards. 

Hope you guys see some correlation. 

Attacks on every major army installation is a clear evidence of Pak army has a continuous line of Islamist rogues. 

Kamra is the most recent example that everyone knows. 

I realize this may not be the best explanation, but hey I have done some home work hopefully it will enlighten some of the readers that assassination of the Gen. Zia was mostly the inside job by those who had been "inspired" by the Islamist cause. 


peace.

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## khail007

The simplest and a befitting reply to this thread is 'HIS MASTERS'.


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## Karachiite

Whoever killed him, thank you very much. Although I wish this pig would have been killed earlier.



no_koadsheding_plz said:


> whoever killed him .. did an awesome and much needed job .. Zia was a scum bag dictator who plunged tho whole nation into the current dark ages .. by bringing his own crooked version of islamic rule ... i hate BB aand zordari etc but to me ZAB was the real ,man who realy wished Pakistan to become a great modern secular independant and progresssive state .. ia on the otherhand brough about talibanization , klashnikovs,extremmisimn,.
> 
> may Zia ul Haq rot in hell ..



Zia was a scumbag no doubt but ZAB was no saint. He raped the nation as well. And ZAB's policies were in no way shape or form secular or progressive. His constitution was the stepping stone for the Islamization of Pakistan. It was him who made Islam the state religion, he outlawed alcohol, gambling etc. He was the one who outlawed Ahmadis. He went as far as making it a law that only Muslims can be PM or Presidents. His nationalization of industries made his friends billionaires over night. All these rich corrupt politicians mainly from Sindh we see now a days benefited greatly from ZAB. ZAB also gave quotas to a certain ethnicity which screwed everything up and now we wonder why our politicians are illiterate and corrupt. Both ZAB and Zia were scumbags and a curse to the nation.

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## no_koadsheding_plz

^^ so what was the point of making pakistan then ? if u think what ZAB did was wrong ? do u think Ahmediz are Muslims in any way ? well no man in his right senses can say so .. but Ahmediz being non muslims doesnt means that they should be persecuted. ..

at least ZAB's islamization was rationale.. Alchohol is not only haram but also destroys social life read on it.... we do not want a secularism that is against our culure and religion.. and ZAB had not brought thing..


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## airmarshal

Zia was killed by people whose war he was fighting. It was marketed as a 'jihad' to incite religious sentiment but it was nothing but a CIA sponsored war against the Soviets. In the end, everyone turned out to be a fool while US got its strategic objective of dismantling Soviet Union. 

we are living with Zia's legacy still. Its nothing to be proud of. Its an institutional intolerance and extremism that has taken roots in our society. Its marginal but it still is a big pain. 

Zia is dead long time ago. I hope his legacy is also dead soon.

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## fatman17

no_koadsheding_plz said:


> ^^ so what was the point of making pakistan then ? if u think what ZAB did was wrong ? do u think Ahmediz are Muslims in any way ? well no man in his right senses can say so .. but Ahmediz being non muslims doesnt means that they should be persecuted. ..
> 
> at least ZAB's islamization was rationale.. Alchohol is not only haram but also destroys social life read on it.... we do not want a secularism that is against our culure and religion.. and ZAB had not brought thing..



u think ZAB actually really believed in these things - he was forced by the maulvis to take these actions to save his seat. consideration for pakistan was never on his mind. - same goes for Zia.

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## RazPaK

Zia haters have no idea wtf they are talking about. Most of you kiddies weren't even born in Pakistan. When Zia was in charge the entire world respected Pakistan. Look at your nation today.


I wouldn't even spit on most of you scum bag liberals.


Especially talking about a man that is dead and cannot even defend himself. Lakh Lanat.


The Indians hated Zia, and you want to know why?


Because he was obviously doing something right.

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## airmarshal

RazPaK said:


> Zia haters have no idea wtf they are talking about. Most of you kiddies weren't even born in Pakistan. When Zia was in charge the entire world respected Pakistan. Look at your nation today.
> 
> 
> I wouldn't even spit on most of you scum bag liberals.
> 
> 
> Especially talking about a man that is dead and cannot even defend himself. Lakh Lanat.
> 
> 
> The Indians hated Zia, and you want to know why?
> 
> 
> Because he was obviously doing something right.



He was doing it right because US was behind him, not out to destroy Pakistan like today. You dont realize the power of evil. If you are with evil, everything is good, if not everything is bad! 

At the time of Zia, Pakistan would have been respected but his legacy has big issues with current Pakistan.

Just like under Ayub Khan, Pakistan was economic model for the world but his policies left a political vacuum. And you know what happened. 

Same with Musharraf. He did a lot of good but by giving NRO and escaping the country, we have to live with his legacy.

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## Mav3rick

airmarshal said:


> He was doing it right because US was behind him, not out to destroy Pakistan like today. You dont realize the power of evil. If you are with evil, everything is good, if not everything is bad!
> 
> At the time of Zia, Pakistan would have been respected but his legacy has big issues with current Pakistan.
> 
> Just like under Ayub Khan, Pakistan was economic model for the world but his policies left a political vacuum. And you know what happened.
> 
> Same with Musharraf. He did a lot of good but by giving NRO and escaping the country, we have to live with his legacy.



But wasn't NRO supposed to give Pakistanis a chance to accept or reject these politicians? We all know what we chose so why should we blame Musharraf for this?



Karachiite said:


> Whoever killed him, thank you very much. Although I wish this pig would have been killed earlier.
> 
> 
> 
> Zia was a scumbag no doubt but ZAB was no saint. He raped the nation as well. And ZAB's policies were in no way shape or form secular or progressive. His constitution was the stepping stone for the Islamization of Pakistan. It was him who made Islam the state religion, he outlawed alcohol, gambling etc. He was the one who outlawed Ahmadis. He went as far as making it a law that only Muslims can be PM or Presidents. His nationalization of industries made his friends billionaires over night. All these rich corrupt politicians mainly from Sindh we see now a days benefited greatly from ZAB. ZAB also gave quotas to a certain ethnicity which screwed everything up and now we wonder why our politicians are illiterate and corrupt. Both ZAB and Zia were scumbags and a curse to the nation.



ZAB I can understand but what did Zia did to deserve such hatred?

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## Abu Zolfiqar

Haseebullah said:


> I heard a theory of the co-pilot shouting to the pilot"Mashood bhai aap kia kar rahe hain?"
> But i guess this topic will remain a detective novel without a finish!



there was a conspiracy theory being propagatated by some sectarian bigots that the Co-pilot of Pak-1 (Flight Lieutenant Sajid, who happened to be Shiia Muslim) may have been "brainwashed" to bring down the aircraft on purpose or perhaps been a sympathizer for Murtaza Bhutto's Al Zulfikar terrorist group 

these theories were later debunked by PAF and the investigators as he was a skilled and trusted pilot -- Gen. Zia had personally entrusted him to fly the aircraft and the people who fly Pak-1 (the actual aircraft as well as the decoy) are the most scrutinized figures, intelligence knows about them more than they know about themselves



the mango explosive story i dont buy it simply because it's well established that there was no explosion aboard that aircraft....nor were there any mayday calls.....i believe the pilots were incapacitated....but as i said who the fack knows

as for Gen. Zia -- well whether some of us agree with him or not or whether "like him" or not i think it's important to note one thing:

soviet expansionism was a direct threat to Pakistan.....it was no secret their nefarious designs in the region. Moreover they massacred many afghan villages and this caused mass exodus to Pakistan

the soviets were the primary arms supplier for india also, and payback in kind was very much warranted which Alhamdulillah we did achieve.

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## Last Hope

Abu Zolfiqar said:


> there was a conspiracy theory being propagatated by some sectarian bigots that the Co-pilot of Pak-1 (Flight Lieutenant Sajid, who happened to be Shiia Muslim) may have been "brainwashed" to bring down the aircraft on purpose or perhaps been a sympathizer for Murtaza Bhutto's Al Zulfikar terrorist group
> 
> these theories were later debunked by PAF and the investigators as he was a skilled and trusted pilot -- Gen. Zia had personally entrusted him to fly the aircraft and the people who fly Pak-1 (the actual aircraft as well as the decoy) are the most scrutinized figures, intelligence knows about them more than they know about themselves
> 
> 
> 
> the mango explosive story i dont buy it simply because it's well established that there was no explosion aboard that aircraft....nor were there any mayday calls.....i believe the pilots were incapacitated....but as i said who the fack knows
> 
> as for Gen. Zia -- well whether some of us agree with him or not or whether "like him" or not i think it's important to note one thing:
> 
> soviet expansionism was a direct threat to Pakistan.....it was no secret their nefarious designs in the region. Moreover they massacred many afghan villages and this caused mass exodus to Pakistan
> 
> the soviets were the primary arms supplier for india also, and payback in kind was very much warranted which Alhamdulillah we did achieve.



AZ.

This is true. There was a call that 'Mashood tum kia kur rhay ho?' which was said by Brigadier Najeeb Ahmed. And then there was nothing else heard. This probably means the nerves gas leaked near the cockpit and the pilots were the first ones to get effected, and dying they started lose the control of aircraft which started to skid and Brigadier then called on them on what's happening. 

This is in the book written by Mutafa Kamal Pasha, which I posted in the previous page.

And people, mostly liberals, hate Zia because of the damage his decisions of promoting Islam and formation of Taliban caused. But they do not understand it was a good decision and need of hour, without which Pakistan would have been a part of USSR today. Today's TTP has nothing to do with these. Taliban and Tahreek-e-Taliban-Pakistan are different organisations. TTP was formed by (not naming) to fight against Pakistan and Pakistan Army. The real Taliban created today are fighting in Afghanistan against the US Army today.

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## amna

Dance said:


> I dislike Bhutto and he is a reason for a lot of our problems.
> 
> But by killing him like that gave PPP the power to use the "shaheed" slogan and the have milked it ever since to win elections. It would have been better to let him finish his term and maybe after seeing what a bad leader he was, PPP would have been finished back then rather than now.



if bhutto was bad, zia ul batil was an azab on pakistan. most likely assassinated by his own prodigies.

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## RazPaK

amna said:


> if bhutto was bad, zia ul batil was an azab on pakistan. most likely assassinated by his own prodigies.



Bhutto was an azab. He is the reason our country broke in half. Lolz, are you serious?


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## amna

bhutto was no angel, but zia makes him look like a baby. every group that uses violence today are Zia's ideological creations - from the political MQM to the sectarian SSP and LeJ to the non-deweaponized returnees of the great afghan jihad - TTP/swat taliban. Bhutto (and a lot of others at that time) may have broken Pakistan in two, but Zia set Pakistan up for slow poisoning.

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## RazPaK

amna said:


> bhutto was no angel, but zia makes him look like a baby. every group that uses violence today are Zia's ideological creations - from the political MQM to the sectarian SSP and LeJ to the non-deweaponized returnees of the great afghan jihad - TTP/swat taliban. Bhutto (and a lot of others at that time) may have broken Pakistan in two, but Zia set Pakistan up for slow poisoning.



Sweetheart, Zia was against extremists. What you are witnessing today is the pent up emotions of Pakistanis that have been brought up with prejudice due to their upbringing. It's always been there. If Zia was alive today TTP would wet their pants.


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## amna

correction: people like zia and hamid gul are against extremists when they are in their own country. but both have channeled and abused extremism while serving as a willing naive tool for US against USSR. without a proper cleanup plan.

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## RazPaK

amna said:


> correction: people like zia and hamid gul are against extremists when they are in their own country. but both have channeled and abused extremism while serving as a willing naive tool for US against USSR. without a proper cleanup plan.



Do you know what happened to Palestinian extremists during Zia's reign?


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## amna

dont care two hoots about arab scum and their issues. i know what his favorite projects have done to pakistan now. do you know what happened to colonel imam?


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## Sinnerman108

^^

You are here to debate ! without having tolerance or stamina to research ?


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## Mav3rick

RazPaK said:


> Sweetheart, Zia was against extremists. What you are witnessing today is the pent up emotions of Pakistanis that have been brought up with prejudice due to their upbringing. It's always been there. If Zia was alive today TTP would wet their pants.


 
Don't you think you are wasting your time on her? Most of Zia's haters are blinded by hatred, they'd rather be Soviet/Indian slaves then free Pakistanis. They cannot even begin to understand the challenge of a Soviet controlled Afghanistan on one side and India on the other.



Last Hope said:


> And people, mostly liberals, hate Zia because of the damage his decisions of promoting Islam and formation of Taliban caused. But they do not understand it was a good decision and need of hour, without which Pakistan would have been a part of USSR today. Today's TTP has nothing to do with these. Taliban and Tahreek-e-Taliban-Pakistan are different organisations. TTP was formed by (not naming) to fight against Pakistan and Pakistan Army. The real Taliban created today are fighting in Afghanistan against the US Army today.



See, this is what I do not understand. You, me and people like us have been explaining the difference b/w Talibaan and TTP to these 'liberals' for so long yet we are thrown right back at the basic argument. So many times I have told people that Talibaan (Mullah Omer, Haqqanis etc.) are true jihadists fighting an invading force for their freedom or for the freedom of their brothers where as TTP is a local asset of a nexus of CIA/MOSSAD/RAW etc. Why that is so hard for some to understand is simply beyond me.

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## Peaceful Civilian

Mav3rick said:


> See, this is what I do not understand. You, me and people like us have been explaining the difference b/w Talibaan and TTP to these 'liberals' for so long yet we are thrown right back at the basic argument. So many times I have told people that Talibaan (Mullah Omer, Haqqanis etc.) are true jihadists fighting an invading force for their freedom or for the freedom of their brothers where as TTP is a local asset of a nexus of CIA/MOSSAD/RAW etc. Why that is so hard for some to understand is simply beyond me.


There is no such thing as good Taliban and bad Taliban. They are illiterate, They will do anything from the order of boss/ameer. They are Islamic extremist. They lives in stone age and becomes jealous from other people who are enjoying modern facilities.
Their fate is suicide death. They will get bad death. their fate is Humiliation, they will get Humiliation even they doesn't like themselves, they even doesn't like their own family, violence on wife is their proud, even they does't like their own children, they throws them in Madrassas with no future and no contribution for country progress.

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## Sinnerman108

Peaceful Civlian said:


> There is no such thing as good Taliban and bad Taliban. They are illiterate, They will do anything from the order of boss/ameer. They are Islamic extremist. They lives in stone age and becomes jealous from other people who are enjoying modern facilities.
> Their fate is suicide death. They will get bad death. their fate is Humiliation, they will get Humiliation even they doesn't like themselves, they even doesn't like their own family, violence on wife is their proud, even they does't like their own children, they throws them in Madrassas with no future and no contribution for country progress.



We can agree to what you are saying.

Do you want to debate the causes of producing these "Talibs" ??

Do you think Taliban were created in 1992 + ?

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## Mav3rick

Peaceful Civlian said:


> There is no such thing as good Taliban and bad Taliban. They are illiterate, They will do anything from the order of boss/ameer. They are Islamic extremist. They lives in stone age and becomes jealous from other people who are enjoying modern facilities.
> Their fate is suicide death. They will get bad death. their fate is Humiliation, they will get Humiliation even they doesn't like themselves, they even doesn't like their own family, violence on wife is their proud, even they does't like their own children, they throws them in Madrassas with no future and no contribution for country progress.


 
This is sad sad analysis. Makes me wonder how old you are, cause if you are a teenager than I would be wasting my time in this argument and if you are older than a teenager than I would most definitely would be wasting my time on you.


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## LeGenD

Last Hope said:


> And people, mostly liberals, hate Zia because of the damage his decisions of promoting Islam and formation of Taliban caused.


Zia was (indirectly) instrumental in laying the foundations of radicalization of Pakistan. He focused on the Soviet issue but not on the repercussions of getting involved in to the games of superpowers. This is why many liberals dislike him and rightfully so. 



Last Hope said:


> But they do not understand it was a good decision and need of hour, without which Pakistan would have been a part of USSR today.


This is a misconception. USSR could not invade Pakistan like Afghanistan because their was no power struggle within Pakistan for communist movement which would have provided USSR the impetus to get involved inside Pakistan like in Afghanistan. The argument of reaching warm waters is also half-baked. USSR would have rather negotiated with Pakistan and Iran for access to warm waters, if it really desired to do so.

In addition, USSR wasn't in its best shape when it invaded Afghanistan. Decades of COLD WAR rivalry and major flaws of the communist system had taken their toll on USSR economy and internal stability. USSR immensely weakened due to this. By the time when USSR invaded Afghanistan; it was only a shell of its former-self.

Think about it; why didn't USSR attempted to harm Pakistan directly? EVER in history?

Pakistani people have been gravely misled on this. 



Last Hope said:


> Today's TTP has nothing to do with these. Taliban and Tahreek-e-Taliban-Pakistan are different organisations. TTP was formed by (not naming) to fight against Pakistan and Pakistan Army. The real Taliban created today are fighting in Afghanistan against the US Army today.


This is also a misconception. TTP has ideological links with Afghan Taliban - whether openly acknowledged or not. All of the Taliban factions (Afghani or Pakistani) help each other when necessary. TTP is basically a Pro-Taliban movement inside Pakistan (formed by some Pro-Taliban Pakistani Tribes) which seeks to break Pak-US alliance on WOT and impose its interpretation of Shariah Rule inside Pakistan just like Mullah Omar did in Afghanistan. While TTP has failed in imposing its interpretation of Shariah Rule in Pakistan; it has certainly succeeded in fracturing Pal-US alliance on WOT. 

TTP movement actually has taken inspiration from Mullah Omar. In addition, the Afghan Taliban isn't so brave and capable either; it uses Pakistan regions for recuperation and also logistical support. One Afghan Taliban faction, in particular, resides in North Waziristan.

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## Anotherangle

LeGenD said:


> Zia was (indirectly) instrumental in laying the foundations of radicalization of Pakistan. He focused on the Soviet issue but not on the repercussions of getting involved in to the games of superpowers. This is why many liberals dislike him and rightfully so.
> 
> 
> This is a misconception. USSR could not invade Pakistan like Afghanistan because their was no power struggle within Pakistan for communist movement which would have provided USSR the impetus to get involved inside Pakistan like in Afghanistan. The argument of reaching warm waters is also half-baked. USSR would have rather negotiated with Pakistan and Iran for access to warm waters, if it really desired to do so.
> 
> In addition, USSR wasn't in its best shape when it invaded Afghanistan. Decades of COLD WAR rivalry and major flaws of the communist system had taken their toll on USSR economy and internal stability. USSR immensely weakened due to this. By the time when USSR invaded Afghanistan; it was only a shell of its former-self.
> 
> Think about it; why didn't USSR attempted to harm Pakistan directly? EVER in history?
> 
> Pakistani people have been gravely misled on this.
> 
> 
> This is also a misconception. TTP has ideological links with Afghan Taliban - whether openly acknowledged or not. All of the Taliban factions (Afghani or Pakistani) help each other when necessary. TTP is basically a Pro-Taliban movement inside Pakistan (formed by some Pro-Taliban Pakistani Tribes) which seeks to break Pak-US alliance on WOT and impose its interpretation of Shariah Rule inside Pakistan just like Mullah Omar did in Afghanistan. While TTP has failed in imposing its interpretation of Shariah Rule in Pakistan; it has certainly succeeded in fracturing Pal-US alliance on WOT.
> 
> TTP movement actually has taken inspiration from Mullah Omar. In addition, the Afghan Taliban isn't so brave and capable either; it uses Pakistan regions for recuperation and also logistical support. One Afghan Taliban faction, in particular, resides in North Waziristan.



1. The criticism of zia's strategy is useless: who knew what USSR would do; if Pakistan hadn't been anti Russia, a communist movement could have been easily started; and how could you say USSR was not a power or only a shell? Even Russian as well as American didn't know what was about to happen. 
It is very easy to be wise afterwards, which Muslim liberals always try to do, but they are almost always wrong: look how bhutto's economic policies backfired.

2. Many people are inspired by many; it doesn't mean they are in control of their ideals or mentors.
TTP is not in control of Taliban and mullah Omar has condemned it as per media reports. this much can be seen through media and what is hidden is in fact more.

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## EyelessInGaza

Apologies for the long post, but over the years I have often thought about who Zia's assassins could be. This is a very interesting lead article in the OP. 

I'm using a very simple *Means, Motive* and *Opportunity* analysis. Obviously, my theory has several flaws, but here goes.

First *Motive*. Who would want to kill Zia? This casts the widest net- KGB/ USSR, RAW/ India, CIA/ USA, KHAD/ Afghanistan would be the usual suspects. But in that category I'd also include disgruntled elements of the Pakistani armed forces. 

However, unless more information emerges to the contrary, I would remove CIA from that list. I don't see why the CIA would take out Zia, even though he may have been a stumbling block to them by then. For all they know, the man replacing Zia could have been even more of a problem. Deep conspiracy theories aside, the US involvement does not scan. 

I would also remove RAW from the list of suspects- Pakistani friends may disagree, but I doubt whether the RAW/ ISI play games involving killing each others' heads of state, or even Generals, Colonels or even Lieutenants for that matter. That's something that can get out of hand very quickly, and nothing I have read in the past, or heard, suggests that it is done. 

Assuming that the hypothesis of a two stage triggered canister of nerve gas in the cockpit is true, let's talk of *Means*. In theory only the KGB or CIA then had the sophistication to create such a device back then. But in practice, anyone could have procured it. RAW/ KHAD from the USSR, the rogue Pakistani military officials from the CIA (perhaps such a device was even a legacy of a previous CIA/ ISI op?).

*Opportunity* is where it gets really interesting. I don't believe that the RAW, KHAD or the KGB had the kind of deep penetration of the Pakistani armed forces that would be required to pull something like this off. The CIA, yes. No offence to Pakistani forummers, but I believe that US penetration of the Pakistani military community was indeed of a sufficient quality to pull it off. 

But I have already expressed my opinion on why the CIA is an unlikely suspect. 

That only leaves the rogue elements in the Pakistani military set up. I believe they had the trifecta of means, the motive and the opportunity, and they are the only ones where it 'makes sense' from those three perspectives. I think that canister was procured by the Pakistani military from western agencies for another op (anti-USSR?), forgotten, then retrieved for this mission *(means*). Some of these personnel had already attempted to kill Zia in the past; their antipathy to him is known (*motive)* . And only Pakistani military personnel could have pulled this off, in terms of combining the access, resources and knowledge to do it (*opportunity*).

As I said, this is a very simple analysis, but I prefer this over more convoluted theories. 

In my next post I will walk through my belief of why the USA hushed the whole thing up, or seemed to.


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## EyelessInGaza

The OP states how the US appeared to be dragging its feet in conducting an investigation of Zia's assassination. Assuming that that is true, I would give a less sinister reason for it than seeing CIA's hand in the whole thing. 

IMO the US kept silent for 2 reasons. One, I believe that the US/ CIA quickly determined that the assassination was carried out via a device of US origin, which would have been very embarrassing for all concerned and kicked off a domestic storm. Two, I think the CIA also suspected that any diligent investigations on their part would lead to an answer no one wanted to discover- that elements of Pakistani military,_ now in positions of power, or at least protected by those in power_, were responsible. Such a 'discovery' would destroy US- Pakistani relations, the US would be forced to take action because 2 of its citizens had also died in the crash. 

No, this was problem no one in the US wanted to solve. So they did not solve it.


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## Aslan

Peaceful Civlian said:


> At-least yar thanks to him. Due to him, our 90,000 soldiers returned back. It was shameless incident in the history of Books when 90,000 our soldier dropped guns. At least they should get Shahadat for the country.
> But on the other side Bhutto was brave than soldier. He gave sacrifice. Guess who was brave??
> Truth may be bitter for you and yes it hurts when we see 1971.



How can one argue with others when our own are such bad students of history. First thing, it was bhutto who was very much responsible for the breaking of Pakistan, not entirely but he was the main reason. And he had his hands dirty with many things, not just the 71 war. He had been on it way before. Him and his family were never and are not and will never have Pakistan's interests at heart, looks to me that they are serving some other masters. Which our dumb people fail to see, coming back to the pt of 90,000 soldiers. Please they were not all soldiers, not all of them. They were a mix of soldiers and civil servants, and normal civilians. And also kindly do know that at many fronts our army kept fighting. It was the political high ups that had given up Bangladesh even before the war started.

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## nafsiati

This year marks the 24th death anniversary of General Zia-ul-Haq. His airplane called PAK-1 (Model C-130 Hercules) crashed on 17th August 1988 about 5 minutes after taking off from Bahawalpur (Zia had flown there to witness a US M1 Abrams tank demonstration).
Due to the unique geopolitical circumstances circumscribing Zia, he was afforded a long list of possible enmities that would surely have wanted him dead. To put things in perspective, he had been targeted on at least six previous occasions including an especially close shave with a missile fired at his plane.
To begin with, one of his most glaringly conspicuous enemies was the Bhutto family ever since he had made the choice to hang the then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on 4th April 1979. He followed that by imprisoning Benazir Bhutto along with her mother, banning PPP and convicting Zulfikar&#8217;s sons Shah Nawaz and Mir Murtaza of harsh offences in absentia. Mir Murtaza, as a result, founded an anti-Zia terrorist group named Al-Zulfikar (The Sword) in Kabul where it shared offices with the PLO. Benazir even called the air crash &#8216;an act of God&#8217;.
Besides that, Zia was a man of military who upon entering politics would often brag that 'The Armed Forces are my constituency'. But even in military he didn&#8217;t have a lot of loyal associates mainly due to his special competence in identifying adversaries for clout and getting rid of them by dismissal or postings well away from the Islamabad and GHQ. Unsurprisingly, quite a few resentful Service chiefs were furtively delighted on his demise. In his book The Bear Trap, ISI&#8217;s Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf says that Zia was persuaded three days before (on 14 August) to attend this demonstration as a signature of goodwill to the US ally and goes on to make a rather weak case that this might have meant complicity of Pakistan&#8217;s top military brass.
However, his prospective slayers were not limited to the Pakistanis. From a geopolitical viewpoint, his death was especially significant for two key reasons. First off, he was the staunchest ally the Americans had fighting a covert war with Soviet on their behalf. This made Soviet along with CHAD (the Afghan secret police trained by the Soviet) his natural enemies. The Soviets were withdrawing from Afghanistan entirely because Zia had given sanctuary to the Mujahideen and had, for about nine years, been training and arming them in a bloodstained guerrilla war that had cost the Soviet military about 15,000 lives. Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Union&#8217;s minister of foreign affairs, had publicly stated that Pakistan would pay profoundly for its support of the Mujahideen weeks before Zia&#8217;s death.

Secondly, Zia had furthered the bold initiative of acquiring a nuclear weapon taken by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto during his regime in response the nuclear test fire by India. As a result of that, tensions had escalated sky high as the two nuclear armed countries were at each other&#8217;s throats as India was rightly paranoid that Pakistan might launch an offence blaming India for the assassination. India even declared three day mourning for Zia&#8217;s death to diffuse the tension. When tensions are this high, perceptions rather than truth often determines the flow of events which in this case could have meant a bloody war.

In his book Ghost, Fred Burton (now working as Vice President for Counter Intelligence and Corporate Security at Stratfor) provides a compelling insight into the investigations jointly carried out by the Pakistanis and Americans which he was a part of as the senior investigator on behalf of Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) with Colonel Daniel Sowada leading the team from USAF. It was then DSS&#8217; job to investigate the death of diplomat overseas and 2 Americans diplomats had also lost their lives in the crash. American Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Lewis Raphel and Brigadier General Herbert M. Wassom, the head of the U.S. Military aid mission to Pakistan, both were aboard. A common misconception is that the two Americans were persuaded by Zia to accompany them as an insurance policy against such a calamity but this is debunked by Burton. Mel Harrison (US embassy&#8217;s Regional Security Officer) admitted to him that the American ambassador had swapped places with him on the final minute as he wanted an opportunity to discuss with General Zia about an attack on American nun and get some sort of assurance to punish the guilty.
The author highlights the mistrustful atmosphere that existed even then between the armed forces of Pakistan and US even after close collaboration between the two. He narrates a particularly interesting incident which I quote here:
&#8220;Gentlemen, please find a seat. We will give you full briefing.&#8221;
Cheech (A Pakistani military personnel he doesn&#8217;t refer to with his actual name but rather his likeness to Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong movies) steps to a podium at the front of the room and surprises us with his first words.
&#8220;We have already solved the mystery. We know how PAK-1 went down.&#8221;&#8230; &#8220;This is a piece of PAK-1&#8217;s fuselage. Notice the hole in it?&#8221; He points to it and pauses again. &#8220;This proves a missile struck the C-130. This is the entry hole.&#8221;
&#8230; I can&#8217;t help myself. This is nonsense. I stand up and say, &#8220;There&#8217;s no way that hole was made by a missile.&#8221;
Cheech coldly responds, &#8220;Oh, What makes you think so?&#8221;
It is so obvious that I&#8217;m not sure how to be polite about it. &#8220;Well,&#8221; I begin, &#8220;if you look at the way the hole is torn in that piece from the fuselage, you&#8217;ll see whatever went through it went from inside to outside. That hole was made by something exiting the aircraft, not penetrating it.&#8221;
&#8230; I pick my pencil and tear a sheet of paper out of my notebook. I hold them both up and push the pencil through the paper. &#8220;See how the paper&#8217;s torn edges push outward from the hole I&#8217;ve just made? They follow the path of the pencil. Take a look at that piece of metal. See all the jagged pieces flowering out of the whole. They bent the wrong way for a missile hit. Something came out of the C-130 through that hole.
The investigation team started ruling out the different causes one by one. The weather was hot and clear and any chance of lightning striking the airplane was ruled out. The aircraft was fuelled at Chaklala Airbase and any possible contamination was checked for with the remaining fuel at the base and that ruled out too. Two crates of mangoes and couple of model aircraft were brought on board all of which were visually screened only. A bomb aboard, however, was also eliminated as an option due to the complete lack of any signature damage found in case of a bomb and also because of the relatively small wreckage radius. Moreover, the autopsy of Brigadier Wassom also showed that he had not inhaled any smoke and hence the absence of any large fire or onboard explosive.
A shepherd called Methuselah, witness to the final minutes before the crash, narrated to the team that the plane after flying straight for a short while started moving up and down mimicking the movement of a roller coaster which he said continued for several minutes until the crash. He also stated nothing from outside had hit the plane. Due to this statement and lack of any other credible evidence at the crash site, a missile hit was also crossed out by the team.
A minor inconvenience a team faced was the unavailability of the cockpit voice recorder since there wasn&#8217;t one installed in the airplane. The communication tower however testified that the correspondence with them was routine and the pilots had not issued a Mayday. On the other hand, the Cessna security plane, responsible for ensuring the security of the route ahead of PAK-1 did hear a momentary transmission from PAK-1 just before it crashed. Someone inside the aircraft had shouted &#8220;Mash&#8217;hood! Mash&#8217;hood!&#8221; The command pilot&#8217;s name was Wing Commander Mash&#8217;hood Hussain and was handpicked by General Zia to fly the airplane. The Wing Commander and the copilot were in top mental and physical condition to handle the flight so pilot error was not a possibility. The tower reported, however, that it was not the copilot and someone most likely from inside of the VIP suit had screamed. Possibility of a deliberate plane crash was also eliminated specially since flying the plane in vicissitudes is hardly the best way to go down.
So it eventually boiled down to one of the two things; either there was some sort of a mechanical disaster (electrical system functioned correctly till the end it was learnt) or someone had taken out both pilots before they could even manage a distress call. The auxiliary systems made into the Hercules can also for some very rough circumstances and an absolute loss of control due to the failure of one system or the other was rather implausible. Plus, the airplane had only flown less than 50 hours since a major overhaul. On the other hand, incapacitation of both pilots would even explain the absence of distress call which would have been certainly made had it only been a hydraulic or some other sort of technical failure giving pilots ample time to react.
Several chunks of the debris were sent to FBI for further examination due to insufficient examination facilities available in Pakistan. The striking conclusion the results led to was that the plane had not crashed because of a mechanical mishap.
Although some VIPs had arms with them none of which were found due to the severe intensity of fire after the crash but the cockpit also had no bullet holes (the bullet would have made it out from the other side at such close range). This was still a possibility but not plausible.
In the end, the truth was eventually disclosed by the ATF lab results. Their tests revealed traces of several sinister elements namely antimony, chlorine and phosphorous in the cockpit and also on a recovered mango seed. The rear cargo door also had traces of PNET, an explosive compound. I quote Fred Burton here:
Antimony. Phosphorous. Chlorine. All are ingredients in various types of nerve gas. One of the most deadly, VX, causes near-instant paralysis followed by death within seconds. Somebody planted nerve gas in the cockpit. This can only mean one thing: President Zia and his staff were assassinated.
&#8230; What was PNET doing on the cargo door, then? During their own investigation, the Pakistanis conclude that a small detonator had been aboard the plane. Attached either to a timer or a barometric pressure device, the detonator touched off a very-small-yield explosion, perhaps just big enough to blow the top of a Coke can placed on the flight deck. The interior of the C-130 is so loud I doubt anyone would have heard such a small pop.
But that&#8217;s what killed the pilots. When the detonator blew, it released the chemical agent into the flight deck. With the flight-deck door open, the small explosion blew enough particles into the rear of the aircraft to be detected on the cargo door.
The pilots never knew what hit them. The crash team determined that the pilots were not wearing their oxygen masks at the time of the crash. That fits with the low altitude the plane was at when the shepherd saw it oscillation through the sky. That rules out a poisoned oxygen system and lends much more weight to the Coke can theory posited by the Pakistanis.
I think they&#8217;re right. Now all that&#8217;s left is to figure out who did it.
He goes on to argue that at the time only three intelligence agencies had the capability to carry out such a sophisticated assassination; CIA, Mossad and the KGB. RAW was not deemed to have the capability to carry this out so neatly at the time. 
Since Zia was America&#8217;s biggest Cold War ally next to Britain, the lack of motive gets them off the list. Due to the nuclear program, there was considerable tension between Zia and Israelis who had also taken out Iraq&#8217;s nuclear program in 1981 &#8216;with a stunning air raid that signaled to the rest of the Muslim world that Israel was prepared to go to any length to ensure that an Islamic country did not get the bomb.&#8217; However, since Pakistan had already acquired full nuclear capability much before August 1988 (mainly due to the blind eye US had towards the Pakistanis in exchange for the Afghan war), killing Zia belatedly made little sense. That left the KGB.
The KGB had the motive i.e. payback, the history of using special chemicals for killing (Georgi Markov assassination), operational capability and may be through the help of Indian intelligence and CHAD officers combined with a very casual security at Bahawalpur or elsewhere (The Bear Trap puts forth the idea that the plant was made at Chaklala where access to C-130s for maintenance was routine) and the opportunity to carry this out.
Much about the intelligence agency responsible for carrying this assassination would have been left at only speculation had it not been for Colonel Sergei Tretyakov. He was the highest ranked officer to defect the SVR (ex-KGB) to the United States. In one of the most interesting leaks by Wikileaks of Stratfor emails shows that Colonel Tretyakov confirmed to none other than Fred Burton himself that KGB assassinated Zia-ul-Haq. Not only that, this assassination is taught as a case study at their intelligence academy.
Case closed.


*Did the KGB killed Zia?*


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## pak-marine

*Who killed General Zia?*

By Khaled AhmedPublished: December 7, 2012

The writer is a director at the South Asia Free Media Association, Lahore khaled.ahmed@tribune.com.pk

*Ijazul Haq*, *son of army chief General Zia, has accused* Zia&#8217;s then vice-chief *General Aslam Beg of being a part of the conspiracy *to kill his father. He appeared on Geo TV on December 1, 2012, and said he was sorry that General Hameed Gul, who was the ISI chief at the time, took no notice of his officers plotting to kill his father. He added that General Beg caused the wreckage of the plane to be removed to hide the effects of a missile fired into the plane from another plane. He also prevented autopsies of the dead to hide the fact that everyone on the plane had died from gas poisoning. A report by an air force officer, Zaheer Zaidi, was suppressed because it focused on the &#8220;other plane&#8221;. He said Beg had reacted to his certain impending replacement with General Afzaal as vice-chief.

No one can say who killed Zia. But when he took Beg as the army vice-chief, Zia was deeply committed to the Arabs in the post-Bhutto period. He was to offer Islamisation in return for funds that went into buying Pakistan&#8217;s sorely needed 40 F-16 warplanes and seed-money for the Zakat Fund. Islamisation was also meant to restrain revolutionary Iran. (Tehran was seen as destablising the Gulf states with acts of terrorism.) In 1980, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was created and Zia could not resist being secretly its &#8216;military teeth&#8217;.

According to Christopher M Davidson in The United Arab Emirates: A Study in Survival (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers), 2005, p.206 and p.244, the plan for an anti-Iran axis existed up until 2001: &#8220;Until September 11, 2001, many of the strongly anti-Iranian emirates had favoured a &#8216;Sunni axis&#8217; comprising the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the Afghan Taliban, in an effort to curb potential Shia expansion.&#8221; The author footnoted that his information had come from &#8220;personal interviews, undisclosed locations, 2003&#8221;.

In 1980, Zia imposed Zakat on the Shia on the basis of a law written by Maruf Dualibi, an adviser to the Saudi King, while sitting in the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII). Islami Nazriati Konsal: Irtaqai Safar aur Karkardagi Council of Islamic Ideology: Evolution and Activity &#8212; (Dost Publications, Islamabad, 2006) records that &#8220;Dr Maroof Dualibi visited the offices of the Council&#8221; p.961. However, the Council&#8217;s own report to the government in December 1981, observed that Hudood laws were discussed by the Council and the Law Ministry under the guidance of Dr Maroof Dualibi who was specially detailed by the Government of Saudi Arabia for this purpose.
During the Iran-Iraq war, Zia became peacemaker and tried to intercede with Imam Khomeini but was not treated well by him because of the GCC affair. (Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future, Norton, 2006, p.162.)
The Arabs and the US were funding Zia&#8217;s jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Shia were excited by the Khomeini phenomenon but were under pressure from the anti-Shia Afghan militias centred in Peshawar. In 1987, when he appointed Beg as vice-chief, Zia had allowed a ****** lashkar to stage a massacre of the Shia in Parachinar in Kurram Agency. The Arab-Iran sectarian conflict was relocated to Pakistan.
In 1985, the Deobandis got into the act, creating the Sipah Sahaba in Jhang (Punjab). In 1986, the Saudi-funded Rabita Alam Islami head of Nadva tul-Ulema madrassa of Lucknow in India, Manzur Numani, decided to compile apostatising fatwas targeting Shias. All the Deobandi madrassas of Pakistan sent fatwas to him to be compiled in a book, later distributed in Pakistan. In 1988, two incidents exacerbated the sectarian war: the massacre of Shias in Gilgit and the murder of Shia top leader Ariful Hussaini in Peshawar.
As Gordon Corera noted in his book Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Security and the Rise and Fall of the AQ Khan Network (Oxford University Press, 2006, p.59-60): &#8220;At this point, without a green signal from Zia, Beg got together with Dr AQ Khan to sell Iran nuclear technology crucial to building an Iranian bomb.&#8221;
Dr Khan was already into selling his wares globally. Iran was the first country to receive centrifuges from him. According to the IAEA, he made the sale to Iran of all the required elements in 1987 in Dubai, collecting payment in Swiss francs. Zia did not know. He did not know either that Beg too had got into the act. (After Zia&#8217;s death, prime minister Nawaz Sharif was shocked that Beg had signed a secret nuclear deal with Iran without telling him.)
Zia had the Pakistan-specific Pressler Amendment to duck to keep the US dollars rolling in. Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar tricked Dr Khan into blabbing about the bomb, which sent Zia ballistic. At this point, the plot to kill Zia may have taken shape involving diverse categories of people, including the two pilots of the doomed C-130.
A report appearing in London&#8217;s Sunday Times titled &#8220;Pakistan&#8217;s Dr Nuke bids for the Presidency&#8221;, (August 24, 2008) by Simon Henderson revealed: &#8220;Khan&#8217;s activities give a new explanation for the crash of President Zia&#8217;s C-130 plane in 1988&#8230;. Wing Commander Mash&#8217;hood Hassan, the plane&#8217;s pilot, had also been flying Khan&#8217;s centrifuge equipment to China. On one such trip he confided in a colleague of Khan that he hated Zia, holding him responsible for the murder of a local religious leader [Ariful Hussaini]: &#8220;The day Zia flies with me, that will be his last flight&#8221;.&#8221; Hardly 10 days after Hussaini&#8217;s murder, on August 17, 1988, his co-pilot, Sajid, had told his mother he was going to do something big as he left home.
In 1993, Ijazul Haq forced prime minister Nawaz Sharif to set up an inquiry commission. The Justice Shafiur Rehman Commission ended the work saying the Pakistan Army did not let it conduct investigation into the Bahawalpur crash. Its report was sealed.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 8th, 2012.


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## Dr. Strangelove

most of you dont even know about your own history and you are arguing about things which you cant even understand 

do you think a comuny afghanistan would have been friendly to us with india on the other side we would have been in hell

zab was a traitor he cared only about staying in power not pakistan and about those 90k POWs india simply wanted to send them back 

zia only did what time required then 
if he would have lived and stayed in power 
he would have solved all the problems

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## Sinnerman108

wasm95 said:


> most of you dont even know about your own history and you are arguing about things which you cant even understand
> 
> do you think a comuny afghanistan would have been friendly to us with india on the other side we would have been in hell
> 
> zab was a traitor he cared only about staying in power not pakistan and about those 90k POWs india simply wanted to send them back
> 
> zia only did what time required then
> if he would have lived and stayed in power
> he would have solved all the problems



That history is coming from the ayatullah centers. For no reason at all.
They keep saying Anti shia laws but never show us any !


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## fatman17

*Who Killed General Zia Of Pakistan? Perhaps The Israelis, The US, Moscow; He Implemented Sharia Law And His Murder Remains Unsolved 25 Years Later*



By Palash Ghosh | April 27 2013.




The smoldering ruins of a destroyed airplane and its dead human cargo in the bleak Pakistani desert are the final snapshots of a mysterious accident that took the life of a world leader a quarter century ago.


General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq seized power in Pakistan in 1977 in a bloodless coup that deposed Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and within a couple of years he transformed a relatively secular nation into a fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship that had, ironically, strong ties to the United States.

In the late summer of 1988, Zia, most of his top military command and an American diplomat were killed when the Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft they were traveling in crashed soon after takeoff from an airstrip in Bahawalpur, about 330 miles south of Islamabad, the capital. Zia and his entourage, which included the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, and Brig. Gen. Herbert M. Wassom, the head of the U.S. military aid mission to Pakistan, had just observed a test of the U.S.-made Abrams M-1/A-1 battle tank at a remote desert location.

Zia&#8217;s death continues to reverberate in Pakistan many years later because his influence in the country is still strongly felt. Despite efforts by current President Benazir Bhutto to repeal much of the harshest Sharia laws backed by Zia -- including such punishments as death for rapists and armed robbers; death by stoning for adulterers; amputation for thieves; and up to 80 lashes for people consuming alcohol -- these modernization efforts have failed to take hold in parts of the country, particularly in conservative rural areas.

Zia&#8217;s so-called Hudood laws (Hudood loosely means restrictions in Arabic) have been instrumental in locking up thousands of women for adultery after they accused men of raping them without producing four Muslim witnesses as required under strict Shariah law. Similarly, religious minorities like Hindus and Christians have been imprisoned (even handed the death sentence) for &#8220;insulting Islam&#8221; under the &#8220;blasphemy&#8221; laws that were hardened under Zia&#8217;s rule.

Indeed, Zia&#8217;s directives are still passionately fought over in every major election in Pakistan -- there&#8217;s one coming up next month -- particularly since Islamic parties like the powerful Jamaat-e-Islami openly endorse the continuation of Hudood.

&#8220;In Pakistan, religious minorities and women have suffered tremendously because of &#8230; the Hudood Laws [all promulgated by] General Zia-ul-Haq,&#8221; said Naeem Shakir, Advocate, Lahore High Court in Pakistan.

But beyond Zia&#8217;s enduring impact on Pakistan, the plane crash that killed the former Pakistani strongman also remains a topic of unending conversation in the country and the region, due to the raft of conspiracy theories, possible culprits and unanswered questions that still swirl around it. 

Immediately after the crash, Pakistani and U.S. Air Force officials investigated the accident but came to drastically different conclusions. The Washington investigators determined the crash was the result of mechanical malfunction, noting that a number of C-130s had experienced similar problems, especially with hydraulics in the craft&#8217;s tail assembly. Then-U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz ordered the FBI not to probe the crash, even though two Americans had died.

The Pakistanis released a separate report that pointed out that the plane suspiciously had snapped cables and problems with the elevator boosters, among other things. Given the chaotic and violent history of Pakistan&#8217;s politics, it is understandable that the Pakistani investigators would suspect sabotage and assassination.

Excluding the real possibility that the Americans were right in blaming the crash on mechanical malfunction, the list of potential culprits comprise an impressive gallery of international suspects who had good reasons to want Zia dead: the Indians, the Russians, the Bhutto family, Pakistani Islamists, Pakistani secularists, the Iranians and -- perhaps most intriguingly -- the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency.

The Russians were the most obvious suspects. In the middle of the Cold War, Zia had allied himself with the U.S. against the U.S.S.R., which had invaded Afghanistan -- and his government was providing Afghan rebels with protection, money and weapons. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was shipping arms to India, Pakistan&#8217;s enemy in the region, to help India maintain a lead in the South Asian arms race.

Stoking the suspicion that the Russians were involved in the plane crash, one of the fatalities was General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, the Chairman of the Pakistan&#8217;s Joint Chiefs of Staff and former head of the nation&#8217;s spy agency, Inter Service Intelligence (ISI); Rehman was a leader of the Afghan mujahedeen&#8217;s war against the Soviets.

Zia&#8217;s death could also have been the result of a plot to seize power from within his own military establishment. In fact, one of Zia&#8217;s senior staff members, General Mirza Aslam Beg, who later rose to the position of Chief of Army Staff, refused to take the doomed flight despite orders to go aboard the plane. Zia's son Ijaz-ul-Haq later accused Beg of involvement in the conspiracy to kill his father; however, Beg made no moves to engineer a post-Zia coup.

Of course, the Bhutto family itself had a powerful motive to kill Zia. In 1975, then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had chosen Zia to become his army chief; two years later, Zia ousted Bhutto from office. Two years after that, Bhutto was convicted of ordering the murder of a political opponent in what many considered a show trial. The ex-Prime Minister was hanged like a common criminal.

Bhutto&#8217;s eldest daughter, Benazir, gained the most politically from Zia&#8217;s death; she was elected Prime Minister only three months after the C-130 crash. If the Bhutto family (or their allies) had something to do with the accident, a group led by Mir Murtaza Bhutto, the brother of Benazir, was likely involved.

Murtaza had formed an armed terrorist group called Al-Zulfikar ("the sword") whose stated mission was the destruction of Zia&#8217;s regime through hijackings, sabotage and assassination. (Ironically, Murtaza would in later years fall afoul of his sister Benazir and himself die under mysterious circumstances in a 1996 shoot-out with police in Karachi).

For the record, Benazir characterized Zia&#8217;s plane crash as an &#8220;act of God.&#8221;

Zia also alienated Pakistan&#8217;s liberals and secularists by imposing Sharia and martial law while periodically promising to hold democratic elections that never took place.

In addition, Zia&#8217;s attachment to Washington -- the U.S. armed Pakistan&#8217;s military with state-of-the-art weaponry, including F-16 fighter planes and AWACS reconnaissance aircraft -- not only upset anti-American factions within Pakistan but created a wider rift with India, which feared the growing militarization of its unfriendly neighbor. Most ominously to Delhi, Zia was committed to developing nuclear bombs.

As a counterweight, India&#8217;s coziness with the U.S.S.R. and its support of the Moscow-based puppet-regime in Kabul only added to the tension in the region. Threats were a daily occurrence, including Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi&#8217;s pointed demand that Zia stop sending arms -- including AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-launchers -- to Sikh separatists who were agitating to form an independent nation in the Indian state of Punjab. Sikhs had murdered Rajiv&#8217;s mother, Indira, when she was Prime Minister.

Pakistan&#8217;s western neighbor, Iran, is also a possible suspect. As a Shia theocracy, Iran felt threatened by Zia&#8217;s ongoing transformation of Pakistan into a religious Sunni state. Iran also grew wary of his close relations to Sunni powerhouse (and Teheran&#8217;s enemy) Saudi Arabia.

Even the Americans have been dragged into discussions about who killed Zia. A theory proposed by General Hameed Gul -- the head of Pakistan&#8217;s ISI agency at the time -- and endorsed by some conspiracy theorists in Pakistan holds that the Central Intelligence Agency wiped out Zia because he was lagging in efforts to set up a democracy in Pakistan and was getting too close to the Afghan mujahedeen -- particularly the fearsome fundamentalist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

In other words, Zia had outlived his usefulness to the Americans, who may have viewed the photogenic, Western-educated Benazir as a more suitable ally in Pakistan.

But perhaps the most compelling conspiracy theory about Zia&#8217;s death was spun by then-U.S. Ambassador to India John Gunther Dean, who pointed the finger at the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.

Dean proposed that Israel feared Zia&#8217;s developing a nuclear bomb and the possibility that he would share it with other Muslim nations or enemies of Israel. Indeed, Zia called his nuclear project an &#8220;Islamic bomb.&#8221;

Israel had already said that it would stop any Islamic state from developing a bomb,and in June 1981, Israeli warplanes destroyed an alleged atomic facility at Osirak in Saddam Hussein&#8217;s Iraq.

Dean posited this theory to State Department higher-ups and was soon after declared &#8220;mentally incompetent&#8221; by the agency and was forced to resign from the diplomatic corps.

After keeping silent for almost two decades, in 2005, Dean once again raised the specter of Israeli involvement in Zia&#8217;s death when he told the World Policy Journal, a publication of New York&#8217;s New School For Social Research, that if Israel plotted to kill Zia, it likely did not act alone. Given the logistical challenges and the 2000-plus miles between Jerusalem and Islamabad, Israel probably colluded with partners, perhaps India, he believes.

When Dean first offered his suggestion that Israel was behind Zia&#8217;s death, he already had a reputation for claiming that Israel was an insidious back bencher on the global stage. A Jew himself who fled the Nazis as a child, Dean had accused the Israelis in 1980 of trying to assassinate him when he was U.S. envoy to Lebanon by bombing his three-car convoy in Beirut. This was supposedly in retaliation for Dean&#8217;s perceived support for the Palestinians.

By 1986, when Dean was posted to New Delhi, he said that both U.S. and Israeli officials pressured him to convince Indian leaders of how dangerous Zia was (despite the fact that Washington was arming Zia, and New Delhi already had grave reservations about the Pakistani general).

It&#8217;s fair to question why Israel would bring down an aircraft carrying two senior U.S. government officials and the Pakistanis. However, as journalist Edward Jay Epstein noted in an article in Vanity Fair in September 1989, Ambassador Raphel and General Wassom were not scheduled to board Zia's plane; they were last -minute additions.

Moreover, Dean is far from the only individual who suspects Israel and its intelligence apparatus of killing foreign or domestic elements it deemed a danger to its security. While Israelis will never admit to any such targeted assassinations, Israeli intelligence and/or security agents are believed to have murdered dozens of people going as far back as 1956, including such prominent people as Heinz Krug, a German rocket scientist working for Egypt&#8217;s missile program in Munich in 1962; Abdel Wael Zwaiter, a member of the Black September terror group, in Rome in 1972; and Abu Jihad, Yasser Arafat&#8217;s second-in command, in Tunis in 1988.

And there is some history to Israeli/Indian behind-the-scenes cooperation, even though they publicly were enemies until only recently. As long ago as 1968, when Indira Gandhi was India&#8217;s Prime Minister, she advised Rameshwar Nath Kao, the founder of the research and analysis wing of India&#8217;s foreign intelligence agency, to establish links with Mossad in order to counter Pakistan&#8217;s deepening ties with China.

However, despite the circumstantial evidence, many experts are skeptical about Israel&#8217;s participation in a plot against Zia.

&#8220;Israel gave up antagonizing Pakistan in the early 1980s when it realized it could not affect outcomes [in South Asia], and would simply provoke becoming targeted [itself],&#8221; said Julian Schofield, a specialist in South and Southeast Asia strategic studies at Concordia University in Montreal.

One thing is certain, though, Israel was a beneficiary of Zia&#8217;s death. Since then, Pakistan has been less of a threat to Israel. Its nuclear program didn&#8217;t produce a weapon until ten years after the plane crash, and it is still a fledgling member of the nuclear club. And rather than focusing on Israel&#8217;s existence, Pakistan has for decades been involved in a myriad of conflicts with India and unending battles against militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan itself.

So whether Dean was right or wrong about Israel, whoever killed Zia -- God, the USSR, secularists, the U.S., India, and on and on -- did Israel a favor.


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## FaujHistorian

fatman17 said:


> *Who Killed General Zia Of Pakistan? ....r.*


*


Gen. Zia and Gen Asif were assassinated. 

Gen. Musharraf had attempt on his life twice. 

Gen. Aslam Beg the Islamist leaning general was the only one to not have an attempt on his life. 



If you look at the big pciture. Zia, Asif, Musharraf were targeted by Islamist faction within Pak army with possible help from AQ. 


No one else could ever penetrate Pak army's solid armor. 

peace*


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## nana41

FaujHistorian said:


> Gen. Zia and Gen Asif were assassinated.
> 
> Gen. Musharraf had attempt on his life twice.
> 
> Gen. Aslam Beg the Islamist leaning general was the only one to not have an attempt on his life.
> 
> 
> 
> If you look at the big pciture. Zia, Asif, Musharraf were targeted by Islamist faction within Pak army with possible help from AQ.
> 
> 
> No one else could ever penetrate Pak army's solid armor.
> 
> peace



Mr.Fauji Historin judging by your"Zia,Asif,Musharraf were tageted by Islamist",i understand where are you coming from.Perhaps you will put down ur jhony walker for a minute and explain me ,what is an Islamist,...btw i know what it means when an english,french or american use this word.

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## jha

fatman17 said:


> *Who Killed General Zia Of Pakistan? Perhaps The Israelis, The US, Moscow; He Implemented Sharia Law And His Murder Remains Unsolved 25 Years Later*
> 
> 
> 
> By Palash Ghosh | April 27 2013.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Zia&#8217;s death continues to reverberate in Pakistan many years later because his influence in the country is still strongly felt. Despite efforts by current President Benazir Bhutto to repeal much of the harshest Sharia laws backed by Zia



What are we supposed to think about the rest part of article after reading this..?


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## pkuser2k12

General aslam baig should have investigated this when he was COA but he did not 

and B.B declared it act of God.what ever severe relations were between B.B and army she should have investigated the people who did it once to highest military officers and commandres could do it again but ppp was busy trying rolling back nuclear program and our beloved lawyer liar leders was busy giving sikhs lists to india

ppp always talks of strengthening Pakistan's defense and they even didn't investigate killing of Pakistan Army chief with other top military brass

THIS SHOWS HOW EAGER PPP HAS BEEN IN REALITY IN STRENGTHEN OUR MILITARY AND DEFENSES

As Gen Hamid Gul said : they want army as the police and patwaris who dance on their finger tips and do work of suppressing opposition

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## upriver

The Soviets did because of his pushiness in Afghanistan, and the Americans did not seem to mind...why was there never an FBI investigation into the death of the American diplomat who accompanied him?


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## Kompromat




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## RangerPK

Anotherangle said:


> 1. The criticism of zia's strategy is useless: who knew what USSR would do; if Pakistan hadn't been anti Russia, a communist movement could have been easily started; and how could you say USSR was not a power or only a shell? Even Russian as well as American didn't know what was about to happen.
> It is very easy to be wise afterwards, which Muslim liberals always try to do, but they are almost always wrong: look how bhutto's economic policies backfired.
> 
> 2. Many people are inspired by many; it doesn't mean they are in control of their ideals or mentors.
> TTP is not in control of Taliban and mullah Omar has condemned it as per media reports. this much can be seen through media and what is hidden is in fact more.



Yes, but why use religion as a tool and spread fitna among Muslims by misguiding them? That is inexcusable.....

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## denel

Absolutely correct. religion is used to destroy lives and misguide. Zia and all his followers have put this country into the darkages.
Education was replaced by religious schools plus indoctrination of jihadist and these are the very seeds which are causing chaos right across.
Of all the men before - they condemned every one to hell.
At least a girl like malala has the courage and say no. 
Who cares about Zia or any one else.

As Malala says - "One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world. Education is the only solution. Education first."

We do not need religion or lunatics.

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## MastanKhan

Anotherangle said:


> 1. The criticism of zia's strategy is useless: who knew what USSR would do; if Pakistan hadn't been anti Russia, a communist movement could have been easily started; and how could you say USSR was not a power or only a shell? Even Russian as well as American didn't know what was about to happen.
> It is very easy to be wise afterwards, which Muslim liberals always try to do, but they are almost always wrong: look how bhutto's economic policies backfired.
> 
> 2. Many people are inspired by many; it doesn't mean they are in control of their ideals or mentors.
> TTP is not in control of Taliban and mullah Omar has condemned it as per media reports. this much can be seen through media and what is hidden is in fact more.



Hi,

Bad information being given by you------pakistanis don't know and don't want to know that pakistan tricked the U S into this conflict-----all the agency's assessments were that afg takeover by russia was to stay local---russians had no reason to conquer pakistan---.

It was Zia who lit the fire of commie invasion of afg and stirred up emotion in the u s through the texas congressman by hiring a socialite as pak goodwill ambassador----

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## BATMAN

denel said:


> Absolutely correct. religion is used to destroy lives and misguide. Zia and all his followers have put this country into the darkages.
> Education was replaced by religious schools plus indoctrination of jihadist and these are the very seeds which are causing chaos right across.
> Of all the men before - they condemned every one to hell.
> At least a girl like malala has the courage and say no.
> Who cares about Zia or any one else.
> 
> As Malala says - "One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world. Education is the only solution. Education first."
> 
> We do not need religion or lunatics.



Lies & Lies and Lies.... all cooked-up, no school was replaced with any religious school by Zia.. I was studying in school, and it did not changed a bit. Hence i see your lies.
If you have an example, please share with name!

One political party was indeed taken with heavy hand and some counter measures were taken to make them behave civilized.

Zia was murdered immediately after the Russian war along with US ambassador, whom Zia used to kept with him., as he was suspicious of US attempting to murder him.. rest only God knows or army may have some hint, which of course is classified, todate.

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## DESERT FIGHTER

simple...........mangoes.... and the man-goes...

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## HAIDER

Zia was actor on stage show name" Afghanistan" , when his role was over he got his paycheck and got robbed...lolzzzzz ..


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## junaid1

i think it's a inside job .some of the generals may be involved .Pakistanis can be easily bought

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## Anotherangle

MastanKhan said:


> Hi,
> 
> Bad information being given by you------pakistanis don't know and don't want to know that pakistan tricked the U S into this conflict-----all the agency's assessments were that afg takeover by russia was to stay local---russians had no reason to conquer pakistan---.
> 
> It was Zia who lit the fire of commie invasion of afg and stirred up emotion in the u s through the texas congressman by hiring a socialite as pak goodwill ambassador----


Ohhh!!! I see! It means the long standing '_US strategy to contain or restrict Russians where they were'_ was obsolete by then? No, sir it was not. I might be ill informed as compared to you but still not that ill-informed.


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## MastanKhan

Anotherangle said:


> Ohhh!!! I see! It means the long standing '_US strategy to contain or restrict Russians where they were'_ was obsolete by then? No, sir it was not. I might be ill informed as compared to you but still not that ill-informed.



Hi,

Thank you for you reply---- the world knows that pakistan tricked the u s into afghan war---.

It was not about containing russia and neither was the u s strategy obsolete regarding russia---it was for the fact that the u s did not have a dog to hunt in that region.

Pakistanis had a make belief---it was their own creation----. Just like the current conflict in afghanistan----U S did not have to enter the arerna---if pakistan military had gone into afg and taken out OBL, Zwaheri and his cohorts.

Pakistanis played a game and it back fired both times----it is a bad bad idea to play russian roullette with the united states of america---they move slow---they move very very slow----.

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## fatman17

*Who Killed Zia?*

VANITY FAIR
September 1989


by Edward Jay Epstein 


On August 17 1988, Pak One, an American built Hercules C-130b transport plane, took off from the military air base outside of Bahawalpur, Pakistan at 3:46 p.m, precisely on schedule. The passengers in the air-conditioned VIP capsule, which included Mohammad Zia ul-haq, the Army Chief of Staff and President of Pakistan. were returning to the capital city of Islamabad after a hot, dusty tank demonstration.

This was General Zia's first trip on Pak One since May 29. He had reluctantly gone to Bahawalpur that morning to witness a demonstration of the new American Abrams tank. Although he himself saw little point in going at a time of national crises to see a lone tank fire off its cannon, the commander of the armored Corp, who had been his former military secretary, was extraordinarily insistent in his phone calls. He argued that the entire Army command would be there that day, implying that if Zia was absent it might be taken as a slight. As it had turned out, the tank demonstration was a fiasco. After helicopters flew him from the airport to the desert site, the much vaunted American tank missed its target ten out of ten times. So much for the tank. Zia went on to the lunch at the officers' mess, eating ice cream, and joking with his top generals. Back at the air strip, he prayed to Mecca, then, before reboarding the plane, he warmly embraced those of the generals that stayed.

Seated next to him on the flight back to Islamabad was his close friend, General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, after Zia, the second most powerful man in Pakistan. He had headed Inter Service intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's equivalent of the CIA, for ten years. There he had been Zia's architect for the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets. 

It was his ISI that had organized the Muejadeen into combat units, trained them, distributed weapons to them, provided them with intelligence and even selected their targets. And now the Mujuedeen was on the verge of winning; the first time the Soviet Union had been defeated since the second world war.

Like Zia, Rehman had not wanted to come to this tank demonstration. He indeed had another appointment in Karachi. He decided to go only when a former deputy of his at the ISI advised him that Zia was on the verge of making major changes in his the army and intelligence high command and suggested that Zia needed his counsel. Rehman had been aware that ever since a huge arms depot for Afghan weapons had blown up in the suburbs of Islamabad that April, killing at least 93 people, Zia had become increasingly uneasy about what might be done to undermine his control in the closing days of the Afghan war. Zia blamed the Soviet trained Afghan intelligence service, WAD, for the blast, but Pakistan politicians criticized him and Rehman for locating the arms depot where it endangered civilians. Zia reacted by precipitously firing his own prime minister, dissolving the parliament and local government on May 29. He had expected changed to be made in the military. So, canceling his meeting in Karachi, he joined Zia on Pak One that morning. He reboarded the plane, wearing his familiar peaked general's hat, with General Mohamed Afzal, Zia's chief of the General Staff.

The remaining two seats in the capsule were given to Zia's American guests: Ambassador Arnold L. Raphel, an old Pakistan hand who had known Zia for twelve years and General Herbert M. Wassom, the head of U.S. Military aid mission to Pakistan. They had also witnessed the dismal tank demonstration, then, Ambassador Raphel found time to pay a condolence call at a convent in Bahawalpur where an American nun had been murdered the week before. Behind them, Eight other Pakistan generals packed the two benches in the rear section of the VIP capsule.

Lt. General Aslam Beg, the Army's vice chief of staff, waved goodbye from the runway, the only top general in the chain of command not aboard Pak One that day. He would fly back in the smaller Turbo Jet, waiting to take off as soon as Pak One was airborne.

A Cessna security plane completed the final check of the area-- a precaution taken ever since terrorists had unsuccessfully fired a missile at Pak One eight years earlier. Then, the control tower gave Pak One the signal to take off.

In the cockpit, which was separated from the VIP capsule by a door and three steps, was the four man flight crew. The pilot, Wing Commander Mashhood Hassan, had been personally selected by Zia. And the co-pilot, the navigator and the engineer had been cleared by Air Force security. Just the day before, they had flown Pak One back and forth on the exact route as a trial run so there would be no surprises. The trip was expected to take an hour.) After Pak One was airborne, the control tower at Bahawalpur routinely asked Mashood his position. He said "Pak One, stand bye" . But there was no response. The efforts to contact Mashood grew more desperate by the minute. Pak One was missing only minutes after it had taken off.

Meanwhile, at a river about 18 miles away from the airport, villagers, looking into the sky, saw Pak One lurching up and down in the sky, as if were on an invisible roller coaster. After its third loop, it plunged directly towards the desert, burying itself in the soil. Then, it exploded and, as the fuel burnt, became a ball of fire. All 31 persons on board were dead. It was 3:51 p.m.

General Beg's turbojet circled over the burning wreckage for a moment. Then the vice chief of stall, realizing what had happened, ordered his pilot to head for Islamabad. That evening, acting as if a coup might be underway, army units moved swiftly to cordon off official residences, government buildings, television stations, and other strategic locations in the capital.

The crash altered the face of politics in Pakistan in a way in which no simple coup d'etat could have done. Pakistan is the only country named after an acronym: "P" stands for Punjab, "A" for Afghanistan, and the "K" for Kashmir. It reflected a dream at best of an Islam state; only the "P" actually became part of Pakistan when it was carved out of British India in 1947 as a haven for *******. But it was a dream that Zia taken advantage of after he seized power in a bloodless military coup in 1977. Mindful that the Shah was unable to control his empire in Iran because he had underestimated the power of Islam, Zia moved almost immediately to placate the mullahs in his country by pursuing a policy of "islamization" and reinstalling the law of the Koran. 

Public flogging was made the penalty for drinking alcohol, amputation of a hand the penalty for robbery, and being stoned to death the penalty for adulatory. Women, if they were teachers, students or government employees, to cover their head with a chador. While he used thousand-year old Koran law to help maintain control over a population of over 99 million people in Pakistan, he strove to build an ultra-modern military machine, complete with state of the art F-16 fighters, Harpoon missiles, and nuclear arms, and to make Pakistan the leading ally of the United States in Asia. It had been an extraordinary balancing act.

Now, the sudden end of Zia and his top generals dead, with no civilian government in place, left a conspicuous void. There was of course still the Army, which General Beg had now assumed command of--which was and always had been the dominant power in Pakistan. There was also the opposition party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, which no longer prevented by Zia from participating in the elections scheduled for that November, could back the candidacy of his arch enemy, Benazir Bhutto. This, in turn, made possible her election-- which was inconceivable if Zia had been in power.

But this still left opened the question of what had happened to make Pak One to fall from the sky at this opportune moment? 

Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto offered perhaps the most convenient explanation: divine intervention. In the epilogue to her book, Daughter of Destiny (which before Zia's death had been entitled more modestly "Daughter of the East"), Mrs. Bhutto notes "Zia's death must have been an act of god". Zia was, as far she was concerned, the incarnation of evil. When she first met him in January 1977, she saw him only as a " short, nervous, ineffectual-looking man whose pomaded hair was parted in the middle and lacquered to his head". She could not understand why her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then the prime minister of Pakistan, had passed over six more senior generals to pick him as head of the Army . Eighteen months later, Zia had usurped power from him and then committed "judicial murder," as she saw it, by allowing her father to be hanged like a common criminal on a trumped up charge. He also banned her father's political party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, imprisoned her and her mother (even though she was suffering from lung cancer) and had both her brothers in exile, Shah Nawaz and Mir Murtaza, tried and convicted of high crimes in absentia. When Shah Nawaz was killed by poison in France in 1986, she suspected it was done by Zia's agents. Zia had decimated her family. She took particular satisfaction that Zia's body was burnt beyond recognition in the plane fire, noting, "Zia had exploited the name of Islam to such an extent, people were saying that when he died, God didn't leave a trace of him."

But there also existed less divine sources of retribution. There was, for example, Mrs. Bhutto's own 34 year old brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto. For the past nine years, he headed an anti-Zia guerrilla group, which shared offices with the PLO in Kabul, Afghanistan (and later operated out of Damascus, Syria) called Al Zulfikar or "the sword". Its proclaimed mission was to destroy the Zia regime, and the means it used included sabotage, highjackings and assassination in Pakistan. It had demonstrated that it had the capacity to carry out complex international terrorist operations when it hijacked a Pakistan International Airlines Boeing 727 with 100 passenger aboard in 1981, flew it first to Kabul, where it executed one passenger and refueled, and then to Damascus, where, with the assistance of the Syria government, it forced Zia to exchange 55 political prisoners for the passengers. It originally had taken credit for the destruction of Pak One in a phone call to the BBC although subsequently, after it was announced that the American Ambassador was aboard it, Mir Murtaza Bhutto retracted this claim. But Mir Murtaza admitted that he had attempted to assassinate Zia on five previous occasions. And one of these earlier Al-Zulfikar assassination attempts involved attempting to blow Pak One out of the sky with Zia aboard it by firing a Soviet-built SAM 7 missile at it. On that occasion, the missile missed, and when the terrorists who fired it were capture they admitted that they had been trained for the mission in Kabul by Mir Murtaza Bhutto and his advisers. Now, with his sister in a position to win the elections if Zia could be removed, Mir Murtaza had an added reason to pursue his mission. But he was not the only one with a motive.

Another suspect was the Soviet Union. Zia had offended Moscow to such a degree that it had declared publicly, only a week before the crash, that Zia's "obstructionist policy cannot be tolerated". In Washington, I was told by a top official in the Pentagon, who was directly responsible for assessing the political consequences of military activity, that his initial concern was that the Soviet Union might have been involved in bringing down Pak One. Earlier that month the Soviet had temporarily suspended its troop withdrawals from Afghanistan to protest Zia's violations of the Geneva Accords that had been signed in May. According to the Soviets, Zia not only was continuing to arm the Afghan Mujuedeen in blatant disregard of the agreement but was directing the sabotage campaign in Kabul that was adding to the Soviet humiliation. After protesting to the Pakistan Ambassador, the Soviet foreign ministry then took the extraordinary step of calling in the American Ambassador to Moscow, Jack Matlock, and informing him that it intended "to teach Zia a lesson".

Soviet intelligence certainly had the means in place in Pakistan to carry out this threat. It had trained, subsidized and effectively ran the Afghan intelligence service, WAD, which had in its campaign of covert bombings in the past year killed and wounded over 1400 people in Pakistan, according to a State Department report released the week of the crash. It had also demonstrated that Spring it could recruit Pakistani accomplices inside military installations. Had Pak One been another of its targets?

After weighing this possibility, the relevant officials in the Pentagon and State Department rejected, according to the official I was interviewing. What persuaded them that the Soviet leadership would not permit such a move, he further elaborated, was the presence of the Ambassador on the plane. They simply did not believe that the Soviets would not have jeopardized Glastnost by assassinating an American of this rank. But later while we were having lunch in his office he mentioned that neither Ambassador Raphel or General Wassom were supposed to fly back on Zia's plane. Both men, at least the day before, had been scheduled to return from the tank exhibition on the U.S. military attache's jet (which General Wassom had flown down on). If so, the perpetrators might not have necessarily reckoned on the American presence aboard the plane. 

The Soviets were not, as it turned out, the only nation to pointedly threaten Zia. In Delhi, Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister of India, informed Pakistan on August 15 it would have cause "to regret its behavior" in covertly supplying weapons to Sikhs terrorists in India. The Sikhs, who were attempting to secede from India and create an independent nation called Khalistan, were a crucial problem for Gandhi. They had assassinated his mother when she was prime minister and, with some 2000 armed guerrillas located mainly around the Pakistan border, the death toll from this civil war was approaching 200 a month. Zia had been meeting with top Sikh leaders, according to Gandhi, and providing guerrillas with AK-47 assault rifles, rocket launchers and sanctuary across the Pakistan border. In response, India had organized a special unit in its intelligence service, known by the initials R.A.S., to deal with Pakistan.

It was not unlike Agatha Christie's thriller Murder on the Orient Express, in which, if one looked hard enough, every aboard the train had a motive for the murder. When Zia's eldest son, Ijaz ul Haq, a soft-spoken, impeccably dressed man now living in Bahrain, described to me how his father was persuaded to go to the tank demonstrations that day by his generals, despite his misgivings, and then General Rehman's sons told me how their father was manipulated into going on the same plane, it raised the possibility that the assassination was the work of a faction in the army. After all, as I learned from Zia's son, Zia had planned to make imminent changes in the military.

Zia's great game had also even offended the United States. It was explained to me at the Pentagon that the CIA had become concerned that Zia was diverting a large share of the weapons being supplied by America to an extreme fundamentalist Muejadeen group led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Not only was this group anti-American but its strategy appeared to be aimed at dividing the rest of the Afghan resistance so that it could take over in Kabul-- with Zia's support. American anxiety was also increasing over the progress Zia was making in building the first Islamic nuclear bomb. His clandestine effort included attempts to smuggle the Kryton triggering mechanism and other components for it out of the U.S., which had only added to the tensions.

In any case, with Zia death, the U.S. could foresee an amenably alternative: the replacement of the Zia dictatorship, with all its cold war intrigues, with an elected government head by the attractive Harvard-educated Benazir Bhutto. With this prospect, the State Department had little interest in rocking the boat by focusing on the past, as the new American Ambassador, Robert Oakley, told me in Islamabad. This decision was apparently made just hours after the charred remains of Zia were buried. Flying back from the funeral, Secretary of State Schultz recommended that the FBI keep out of the investigation. Even though the FBI had the statutory authority for investigating crashes involving Americans, and its counter-terrorism division had already assembled a team of forensic experts to search for evidence in the crash, it complied with this request.

During his confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relation Committee, Oakley explained "the judgment of the State Department and the Defense Department was that [the FBI forensic experts] would not add any expertise to the team and that it might create complications because we had already obtained something rather extraordinary, that is, the permission of the government of Pakistan to have U.S. investigators fully involved, with full access to everything which had occurred, involving the death under mysterious circumstances of the President of Pakistan." The result was that the U.S. team assigned to Pakistan's Board of Inquiry included only seven air force accident investigators-- and excluded any criminal, counter-terrorist or sabotage experts.

An unrestricted investigation by the FBI also could have opened up a potential Pandora's box of geo-political troubles. What if, for example, it pointed towards a superpower, a neighbor, or Pakistan's military itself? It could undermine everything the United States was striving to achieve by damaging detente, leading to armed confrontation on Pakistan's borders or even de-stabilize the new and shaky Pakistan government. Why chance such uncontrollable consequences when the change in power could be attributed to an "accident" or "act of god?

The State Department evidently decided to work to control media and public perception of what had caused the crash. Just before a summary of the Board of Inquiry' findings was to be released to the press, Oakley sent a classified telegram from Islamabad providing "press guidance." He advised in a follow-up telegram "It is essential that U.S. Government spokespersons review and coordinate on proposed guidance before commenting to the media on the GOP [Pakistan] release".

This spin control effectively deflected press attention from the report's conclusion actual conclusion that the probable cause of the crash was sabotage. On October 14th, 72 hours before that release, the State Department leaked a pre-emptive story to theNew York Times headlined "Malfunction Seen as Cause of Zia Crash". It began " Experts sent to Pakistan ... have concluded that the crash was caused by a malfunction in the aircraft". But on October 17, when the summary was released, the headline had to be changed to "Pakistan Points to Sabotage in Zia crash". TheTimes now correctly reported that Pakistan's Board of Inquiry had concluded "the accident was most probably caused through the perpetuation of a criminal act or sabotage". But unnamed administration spokespersons, continuing with their pre-prepared press guidance, added to the story that "the Pakistani findings were not the same as findings by American experts." They even suggested a psychopathological explanation for the Board's finding, saying that it reflected a"mind set" among Pakistan military officers who wanted instability so they had an excuse for continuing their military rule.

The problem with this press guidance was that it was misinformation. There was no such divergence between the American and Pakistanis experts involved in the investigation, and no separate American conclusion of a "malfunction". Nor was it a conspiratorial Pakistani "mind set" that had ruled out a malfunction as the cause of the crash. This was the conclusion the six American Air Force experts, headed by Colonel Daniel E. Sowada, that comprised the U.S. Assistance and advisory team, which was supported by laboratories in the United States. They, not the Pakistani, had actually written the sections of the report that investigated all possible mechanical failure of the aircraft that led the Board to state it had been " unable to substantiate a technical reason for the accident." This was confirmed to me by both the head of the Pakistan investigating team and an American assistant secretary of defense. Colonel Sowada himself gave secret testimony before the subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs that acknowledged that no evidence of a mechanical failure had been found.

The conclusion of sabotage became inescapable after the accident investigators eliminated virtually all other causes. Sherlock-Holmes like detective work is contained in a red-bound 365 secret investigation report, which the relevant sections of were read to me by a Pentagon official in his office. Like Sherlock Holmes, it used on a process of elimination. First, they were able to rule out the possibility that the plane had been blown up in mid air. If it had exploded in this manner the pieces of the plane, which had different shapes and therefore resistance to the wind, would have been strewn over a wide area-- but that had not happened. By re-assembling the plane in a giant jigsaw puzzle, and scrutinizing with magnifying glasses the edges of each broken piece, they could established that the plane was in one piece when it had hit the ground. They thus concluded structural failure--ie. The breaking up of the plane-- was not the cause.

Nor had the plane been hit by a missile. That would have generated intense heat which in turn would have melted the aluminum panels and, as the plane dived, the wind would have left tell-tale streaks in the molten metal. But there were no streaks on the panels. And no missile part or other ordinance had been found in the area.

They could also rule out the possibility that there was an inboard fire while the plane was in the air since, if there had been one, the passengers would have breathed in soot before they died. Yet, the single autopsy performed, which was on the American general seated in the VIP capsule, showed there was no soot in his trachea, indicating that he had died before, not after, the fire ignited by the crash. 

The next possibility they considered was that the power had somehow failed in flight. If this had happened, the propellers would not have been turning at their full torque when the plane crashed, which would have affected the way their blades had broken off and curled on impact. But by examining the degree of curling on each broken propeller blades, they determined that in fact the engines were running at full speed when the propellers hit the ground. They also ruled out the possibility of contaminated fuel by taking samples of the diesel fuel from the refueling truck, which had been impounded after the crash. By analyzing the residues still left in the fuel pumps, they could also tell that they had been operating normally at the time of the crash.

They deduced that the electric power on the plane had been working because both electric clocks on board had stopped at the exact moment of impact, which they determined independently from eye witnesses and other evidence. 

The crash had occurred, moreover after a routine and safe take off in perfectly clear daytime weather. And the pilots were experienced with the C-130 and in good health. Since the plane was not in any critical phase of flight, such as take off or landing, where poor judgment on the part of the pilots could have resulted in the mishap, the investigators ruled out pilot error as a possible cause.

They thus came down to one final possibility of mechanical failure: the controls did not work. But the Hercules C-130 had not one but three redundant control system. The two sets of hydraulic controls were backed up, in case of a leak of fluid in both of them, by a mechanical system of cables. If any one of them worked, the pilots would have been able to fly the plane. By comparing the position of the controls with the mechanisms in the hydraulic valves and the stabilizers in the tail of the plane (which are moved through this system when the pilot moves the steering wheel), they established that the control system was working when the plane crashed. This was confirmed by a computer simulation of the flight done by Lockheed, the builder of the C-130. They also ruled out the possibility that the controls had temporarily jammed by a microscopic examination of the mechanical parts to see if there were any signs of jamming or binding. (The only abnormality they found, which led to a long separate appendix, was that there were brass particles contaminating the hydraulic fluid. Although they could not explain this contamination, they found that it could have accounted only for gradual wear and tear on the parts, not a sudden loss of control).

Having ruled out all the mechanical malfunctions that could cause a C-130 to fall from the sky in that manner, the American team left it to the Board to conclude "the only other possible cause of the accident is the occurrence of a criminal act or sabotage leading to the loss of control of the aircraft". 

This conclusion was reinforced when an analysis of chemicals found in plane's wreckage, done by the laboratory of Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco in Washington, found foreign traces of pentaerythritol tertranitrate (PNET), a secondary high explosive commonly used by saboteurs as a detonator, as well as antimony and sulfur, which in the compound antimony sulfide is used in fuses to set off the device. Using these same chemicals, Pakistan ordinance experts reconstructed a low-level explosive detonator which could have been used to burst a flask the size of a soda can which, the Board suggested, probably contained an odorless poison gas that incapacitated the pilots.

But this was as far as the Board of Inquiry could go. It had not had autopsies done on the remains of the crew members to determine if they were poisoned. It acknowledged in its report that it lacked the expertise to investigate criminal acts. What was needed was criminal investigators and interrogators. It thus recommended that the task of finding the perpetrators by turned over to the competent agency, which meant, as one of the investigators explained to me, Pakistan's intelligence service--the ISI.

When I got to Pakistan in February and called upon General Hamid Gul, the Director General of the ISI, I found out that political events had apparently overtaken this mandate. He told me that his agency had called off its investigation at the request of the government and had transferred the responsibility for it to a "broader based" government authority headed by a civil servant called F.K. Bandial. It was not using the resources of his intelligence service and, as far as he knew that committee had not begun the work. His tone suggested that, he did not expect any immediate resolution of the crime.

But it was still possible to come to some reasonable conclusions about what happened to Pak One, if not the precise cause. And there were still outstanding, however, disturbing pieces of evidence. A crucial piece missing in the puzzle was what had happened to the pilots during the final minutes of the flight because the accident investigators found that there was no black box or cockpit recorder on Pak One to recover. Yet, there were three other planes in the area tuned to the same frequency for communications-- General Beg's turbojet, which was waiting on the runway to take off next, Pak 379, which was the backup C-130 in case anything went wrong to delay Pak One, and a Cessna security plane that took off before Pak One to scout for terrorists. I managed to locate pilots of these planes-- all of whom were well acquainted with the flight crew of Pak One and its procedures-- who could listen to the conversation between Pak One and the control tower in Bahawalpur. They independently described the same sequence of events. First Pak One reported its estimated time of arrival in the capital. Then, when the control tower asked its position, it failed to respond. At the Same Time Pak 379 was trying unsuccessfully to get in touch with Pak One to verify its arrival time. All they heard from Pak One was "stand by" but no message followed. When this silence persisted, the control tower got progressively more frantic in its efforts to contact Zia's pilot, Wing Commander Mash'hood. Three or four minutes passed. Then, a faint voice in Pak One called out "Mash'hood, Mash'hood". One of the pilots overhearing this conversation recognized the voice. It was Zia's military secretary, Brigadier Najib Ahmed who apparently, from the weakness of his voice, was in the back of the flight deck (where a door connected to the VIP capsule.) What this meant that the radio was switched on and was picking up background sounds; in this sense, it was the next best thing to a cockpit flight recorder. Under these circumstances, the long silence between "stand bye" and the faint calls to Mash'hood, like the dog that didn't bark, was the relevant fact. Why wouldn't Mash'hood or the three other members of the flight crew spoken if they were in trouble? 

The pilots aboard the other planes, who were fully familiar Mash'hood, and the procedures he was trained in, explained that if Pak One's crew was conscious and in trouble they would not in any circumstances have remained silent for this period of time. If there had been difficulties with controls, Mash'hood instantly would have given the emergency "may day" signal so help would be dispatched to the scene. Even if he had for some reason chosen not to communicate with the control tower, he would have been heard shouting orders to his crew or alerting the passengers to prepare for an emergency landing. And if there had been an attempt at a hijacking in the cockpit or scuffle between the pilots, it would also be overheard. At the minimum, if the plane was crashing towards earth, screams or groans would have been heard. The radio must have been working since it picked up the brigadier's voice. In retrospect, the pilots had only one explanation for the prolonged silence: Mash'hood and the other pilots were either dead or unconscious while the microphone had been kept opened by the clenched hand of one of the pilots' on the thumb switch that operated.

I could not be ascertain if such tapes actually existed. If they did, the clarity could possibly enhanced to separate other background sounds from the static. Although one witness claimed that he had listened to recordings of these conversations after the crash to identify Mash'hood's voice, the control tower operators at Bahawalpur denied having recorded the conversations although they suggested it might have been taped by the main airport at Muelton forty miles away.In any case, the account of the eyewitnesses at the crash site dove-tailed with the radio silence. They had seen, it will be recalled, the plane pitching up and down as if it were on a roller coaster. According to a C-130 expert I spoke to at Lockheed, C-130's characteristically go into a pattern known as a "phugoid" when no pilot is flying it. First, the unattended plane dives towards the ground, then the mechanism in the tail automatically over-corrects for this downward motion, causing it to head momentarily upwards. Then, with no one at the controls, it would veer downward. Each swing would become more pronounced until the plane crashed. Analyzing the weight on the plane, and how it had been loaded on, this expert calculated the plane would have made three roller-coaster turns before crashing, which is exactly what the witnesses had been reported. He concluded from this pattern that the pilots had been conscious, they would have corrected the "phugoid"-- at least would have made an effort, which would have been reflected in the settings of the controls. Since this had not happened, he concluded, like the pilots in the other planes, that they were unconscious. He suggested that this could be accomplished be planting a gas bomb in the air vent in the C-130, triggered to go off, when the plane took off and pressurized air was fed into the cockpit.

My investigations at the Bahawalpur airport showed that planting a gas bomb on the plane that day would not have entailed any insurmountable problems. Instead of following prescribed procedures and flying to the nearby air base at Muelton where it could be guarded, Pak One had remained at the air strip that day. According to one inspector there, a repair crew, which included civilians, had worked on adjusting the cargo door of Pak One for two hours that morning. Its workers entered and left the plane without any sort of search. Any one of them could dropped a gas bomb into the air vent. 

I also spoke to an American chemical warfare expert about poison gases that could have been used. He explained that Chemical agents capable of knocking a flight crew, while extremely difficult to obtain, are not beyond the reach of any intelligence service, or underground group with connections to one. He also pointed out that a gas capable on insidiously poisoning a whole flight crew (and leaving the pilot's fingers locked on the radio switch) had been used in neighboring Afghanistan. According to the State Department's special report 78 on "Chemical Warfare in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan," which he sent me, corpses of rebel Muejadeen guerrillas were found still holding their rifles in firing positions after being gassed. This showed that they had been the victims of "an extremely rapid acting lethal chemical that is not detectable by normal senses and that causes no outward physiological responses before death." This gas manufactured by the Soviet would have done the trick. But so would American manufactured "VX" nerve gas, according to a scientist at the U.S. Army chemical warfare center in Aberdeen, Maryland. "VX" is odorless, easily transportable in liquid form, and a soda-sized can full would be enough, when vaporized by a small explosion, and inhaled, to causes paralyzes and loss of speech within 30 seconds. According to him, the residue it would leave behind would be phosphorous. And, as it turned out, the chemical analyzes of debris from the cockpit showed heavy traces of phosphorous.

Such an act of sabotage would probably leave other detectable traces. The chemical agent that killed or paralyzed the pilots could probably be determined through an autopsy of their bodies. If it was a sophisticated nerve gas, it had to be obtained from one of the few countries that manufactures it, transported across international borders, and packaged with a detonator and fuse mechanism into bomb that would burst at the right moment after take off. All this could be trace back, just as the bomb on Pan Am 103 in Scotland was eventually identified and traced. Moreover, in Pakistan, the device had to be delivered to an agent capable of planting it on Pak One at a military air base. And someone had to supply him with intelligence about Zia's movements, the operations of Pak One, and the gaps in its security. Since access was limited to a few dozen persons, these people were vulnerable to discovery through an ordinary police investigation. Access to American intelligence resources, such as the technical labs of the FBI, the counter-terrorist profiles of the CIA, and the electronic eavesdropping archives of the National Security Agency, might also have helped locate the source of the intelligence (especially if it had been broadcast). But I found no such determined investigation took place.

To begin with, as noted by the Board of Inquiry, autopsies were never performed on the bodies of the flight crew. The explanation told to me by the Pentagon official, and apparently given in the secret report, was that Islamic law requires burial within 24 hours. But this could not been the real reason since the bodies were not returned to their families for burial until two days after the crash, as relatives confirmed to me. Nor were they ever asked permission for autopsy examinations. And, as I learned from a doctor for the Pakistan Air Force, Islamic law not withstanding, autopsies are routinely done on pilots in cases of air crashes. I further determined from sources at the military hospital in Bahawalpur that parts of the victims' bodies had been brought there in plastic body bags from the crash site on the night of August 17, and stored there, so that autopsies could be performed by team of American and Pakistani pathologists. On the afternoon of August 18,however, before the pathologists had arrived, the hospital received orders to return these plastic bags to the coffins for burial. The principal evidence of what happened to the pilots was thus purposefully buried.

The police investigation of those who had access to Pak One at the airport and were involved in its security, also appeared to be similarly curtailed. According to a security officer who was there that day, the ground personnel was not methodically questioned. Instead, they said in interviews almost uniformly that they were amazed that no one was interrogated. The only inquiry that they saw taking place was the inquiry by the American team. The questions by the Americans, which had to go through a Pakistani translator, were largely confined to the aircraft's maintenance and movements prior to take off. Other activities that day were not explored. For example, according to a police inspector at Bahawalpur, a policeman at the airstrip that day was found murdered shortly thereafter, but it was not connected to the air crash or, for that matter, resolved.

For its part, Pakistani military authorities attempted to foist a explanation that Shi'ite fanatics were responsible for the crash. 

The only basis for this theory was that the co-pilot of Pak One, Wing Commander Sajid, happened to have been a shi'ite (as are more than ten per cent of Pakistan's *******). The pilot of the back-up C-130, who also was a shi'ite, was then arrested by the military and kept in custody for more than two months while military interrogators tried to make his confess that he had persuaded Sajid to crash Pak One in a suicide mission. Even under torture, he denied this charge and insisted that, as far as he knew, Sajid was a loyal pilot who would not commit suicide. Finally, the army abandoned this effort the Air Force demonstrated that it would have been physically impossible for the co-pilot alone to have caused a C-130 to crash in the way it did. And if he had attempted to overpower the rest of the flight crew, the struggle certainly would have been heard over the radio. But why had the military attempted to cook up this shi'ite red herring?

There were other indications of efforts to limit or divert from the investigation, such as the destruction of telephone records of calls made to Zia and Rehman just prior to the crash, the reported disappearances of ISI intelligence files on Murtaza Bhutto, and the transfer of military personnel at Bahalapur, which, taken together, appeared to add up to a well-organized cover up. If so, I was persuaded that it had to be an inside job. The Soviet KGB and Indian R.A.W. Might have had the motive, and even the means, to bring down Pak One but neither had the ability to stop planned autopsies at a military hospital in Pakistan, stifle interrogations or, for that matter, kept the FBI out of the picture. The same is true of anti-Zia underground, such as Al-Zulfikar, although its agents, like the shi'ite, would provide plausible suspects ( or even, if provided convenient access to Pak One, fall guys.) Nor would any foreign intelligence service which was an enemy of Zia's have much of a motive for making it look like an accident rather than an assassination. Only elements inside Pakistan would have an obvious motive for making it the death of Zia, Rehman and 28 others look like something more legitimate than a coup d' etat.

The most eerie aspect of the affair was the speed and effectiveness with which it was consigned to oblivion. Even it involved the incineration of the principal ally of the U.S. in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the abrupt end of the American Ambassador and the head of its military mission in Pakistan were killed in the course of discharging their duties, and the government of one of the few remaining allies of the U.S. In Asia was abruptly changed; there little occurred in the way of repercussions. No outcries for vengeance, no efforts at counter coups, no real effort to find the assassins. In Pakistan, Zia and Rehman's names disappeared within days from television, newspapers and other media-- except on a few monuments in Afghan refugee camps that had not yet been painted over. In the United States, the State Department blocked any FBI interest in investigating the death of its Ambassador and, through press "guidance", distorted the event into just another foreign plane accident. The one uncounted casualty of Pak One was the truth.


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## Panther 57

To get the correct account of this crash read a series of columns written by Late Gp Capt(R) Zaheer ul Hasan Zaidi, who headed the investigation and later published in Daily Jang. It is indeed an Agatha Christie's Novel.


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## janon




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## PlanetWarrior

Were the mangoes which were loaded on the plane imported from India ?


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## Jayanta

TaimiKhan said:


> KGB could not have been able to infiltrate so much, this was the work of someone whom we already knew.



It must be an inside job..


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## senses

ISI must have the pictures of the crash site...locked deep in the inventory.


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## Donatello

It was just a plane crash.


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## Viking 63

There is no doubt that it was an inside job, perhaps with outside help maybe KGB.


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## Capt.Popeye

Donatello said:


> It was just a plane crash.



That is right.
The plane crashed when some "_mangoes"_ exploded. 
What mangoes were they: *Anwar Ratol or Chaunsa or Sindri or Dussehri or Langra or Fajri or Saroli or BaganPali or Neelum or Shaan e Khuda *?
Must have been *Shaan e Khuda* _!_


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## Levina

janon said:


>


The link doesnt work....


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## Donatello

Capt.Popeye said:


> That is right.
> The plane crashed when some "_mangoes"_ exploded.
> What mangoes were they: *Anwar Ratol or Chaunsa or Sindri or Dussehri or Langra or Fajri or Saroli or BaganPali or Neelum or Shaan e Khuda *?
> Must have been *Shaan e Khuda* _!_


Totapuri..


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## janon

levina said:


> The link doesnt work....


It was posted more than a year back!


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## Capt.Popeye

Donatello said:


> Totapuri..



*Totapuri* mangoes are only good for making 'pickles'.


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## Donatello

Capt.Popeye said:


> *Totapuri* mangoes are only good for making 'pickles'.


Hence the plane crash.


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## Levina

janon said:


> It was posted more than a year back!


I know.
Do tell me the tag of that video so I can search it on youtube.


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## janon

levina said:


> I know.
> Do tell me the tag of that video so I can search it on youtube.


Actually I don't remember it either. I tried googling the youtube link, but none of the results had the caption.


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