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Who Killed Gen. Zia Ul Haq

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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’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 ‘an act of God’.
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’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’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’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’s minister of foreign affairs, had publicly stated that Pakistan would pay profoundly for its support of the Mujahideen weeks before Zia’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’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’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’ 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’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:
“Gentlemen, please find a seat. We will give you full briefing.”
Cheech (A Pakistani military personnel he doesn’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.
“We have already solved the mystery. We know how PAK-1 went down.”… “This is a piece of PAK-1’s fuselage. Notice the hole in it?” He points to it and pauses again. “This proves a missile struck the C-130. This is the entry hole.”
… I can’t help myself. This is nonsense. I stand up and say, “There’s no way that hole was made by a missile.”
Cheech coldly responds, “Oh, What makes you think so?”
It is so obvious that I’m not sure how to be polite about it. “Well,” I begin, “if you look at the way the hole is torn in that piece from the fuselage, you’ll see whatever went through it went from inside to outside. That hole was made by something exiting the aircraft, not penetrating it.”
… 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. “See how the paper’s torn edges push outward from the hole I’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’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 “Mash’hood! Mash’hood!” The command pilot’s name was Wing Commander Mash’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.
… 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’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’re right. Now all that’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’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’s nuclear program in 1981 ‘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.’ 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?
 
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’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 “other plane”. 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’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 ‘military teeth’.

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: “Until September 11, 2001, many of the strongly anti-Iranian emirates had favoured a ‘Sunni axis’ comprising the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the Afghan Taliban, in an effort to curb potential Shia expansion.” The author footnoted that his information had come from “personal interviews, undisclosed locations, 2003”.

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 — (Dost Publications, Islamabad, 2006) records that “Dr Maroof Dualibi visited the offices of the Council” p.961. However, the Council’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’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): “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.”
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’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’s Sunday Times titled “Pakistan’s Dr Nuke bids for the Presidency”, (August 24, 2008) by Simon Henderson revealed: “Khan’s activities give a new explanation for the crash of President Zia’s C-130 plane in 1988…. Wing Commander Mash’hood Hassan, the plane’s pilot, had also been flying Khan’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]: “The day Zia flies with me, that will be his last flight”.” Hardly 10 days after Hussaini’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.
 
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
 
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 !
 
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’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’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 “insulting Islam” under the “blasphemy” laws that were hardened under Zia’s rule.

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

“In Pakistan, religious minorities and women have suffered tremendously because of … the Hudood Laws [all promulgated by] General Zia-ul-Haq,” said Naeem Shakir, Advocate, Lahore High Court in Pakistan.

But beyond Zia’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’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’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’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’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and former head of the nation’s spy agency, Inter Service Intelligence (ISI); Rehman was a leader of the Afghan mujahedeen’s war against the Soviets.

Zia’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’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’s eldest daughter, Benazir, gained the most politically from Zia’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’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’s plane crash as an “act of God.”

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

In addition, Zia’s attachment to Washington -- the U.S. armed Pakistan’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’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’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’s mother, Indira, when she was Prime Minister.

Pakistan’s western neighbor, Iran, is also a possible suspect. As a Shia theocracy, Iran felt threatened by Zia’s ongoing transformation of Pakistan into a religious Sunni state. Iran also grew wary of his close relations to Sunni powerhouse (and Teheran’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’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’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’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 “Islamic bomb.”

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’s Iraq.

Dean posited this theory to State Department higher-ups and was soon after declared “mentally incompetent” 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’s death when he told the World Policy Journal, a publication of New York’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’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’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’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’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’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’s Prime Minister, she advised Rameshwar Nath Kao, the founder of the research and analysis wing of India’s foreign intelligence agency, to establish links with Mossad in order to counter Pakistan’s deepening ties with China.

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

“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],” 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’s death. Since then, Pakistan has been less of a threat to Israel. Its nuclear program didn’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’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.
 
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
 
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.
 
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’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..?
 
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
 
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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