Mourning for Bhutto is giving way to anger and suspicion, writes Mary Fitzgeraldin Karachi
The air inside Benazir Bhutto's Karachi residence is thick with incense and the sound of women keening and weeping.
A series of framed cartoons lines the stairs leading to her office. Each of the charcoal sketches features Bhutto herself, and they provide a telling glimpse into the mind of the woman mourned by millions in Pakistan since her assassination last week.
"I have never made but one prayer: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it," reads one.
Another shows Bhutto standing in front of a portrait of her father, who was hanged in 1979. "Every absence is an age," it reads. The caption above the next declares "I can smell a trap in a minute. And I do."
Grieving guests and members of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) drift in and out of a warren of rooms hung with campaign posters and paintings of Bhutto as a teenager.
For everyone here, there is no mystery over the circumstances of Bhutto's killing at an election rally in Rawalpindi. "It's a clear-cut case," says Fehmida Mirza, a PPP assembly member and close friend of Bhutto. "But all we have heard from the government in the last days is a pack of lies."
Just over 24 hours after Bhutto's death, Pakistan's interior ministry said three shots had been fired moments before a suicide bomber struck the gathering.
The ministry's spokesman told reporters Bhutto had not been killed by gunfire or shrapnel, claiming instead that she had ducked the bullets before fracturing her skull when the force of the blast slammed her head against a fitting on her vehicle's sunroof. The government repeated that assertion yesterday despite mounting scepticism.
The PPP has insisted from the beginning that their leader was shot in the neck, and that the bullet exited from the back of her head.
Party spokeswoman Sherry Rehman, who was with Bhutto when the attack occurred, and later helped clean her body at the hospital, says she saw two head wounds that bled profusely.
Video footage broadcast widely on Pakistani television since Monday appears to corroborate the PPP's version of events, giving rise to further doubts about the government's account. It shows a clean-cut young man in sunglasses approaching Bhutto's armoured vehicle along with the suspected suicide bomber. Seconds later, the first man fires a pistol at Bhutto, her hair and headscarf blow back and she drops back in the vehicle just as a bomb explodes.
Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, said the video was proof the government had tried to "muddy the water" from the outset. Interior minister Hamid Nawaz Khan said yesterday detectives would examine the video footage, adding the investigation would "take some time".
Doctors at the hospital where Bhutto died released an inconclusive report saying the cause of death was "an open head injury with depressed skull fracture, leading to cardiopulmonary arrest". Sources at the hospital said staff there had come under intense pressure before issuing the report.
No autopsy had been performed, at the request of Bhutto's family. Her husband insisted it was unnecessary when the cause of death was so obviously a bullet wound.
In a country where conspiracy theories abound, the contradictory accounts of how Bhutto died have prompted a multitude of questions. Some see in the differing stories an attempt by the government to evade responsibility for lax security. Others believe something more sinister is afoot, suspecting officials of trying to cover up the possible involvement of elements within the government or security establishment.
Former director of Pakistan's intelligence services Asad Durrani says the fact a gunman could come close enough to fire at Bhutto's cavalcade shows there was a serious security lapse. "The government has made it difficult for themselves," he told The Irish Times. "I suspect they thought they would be blamed for not providing enough security so they tried to cover their backs but instead of taking the heat off themselves, they managed the reverse."
Like many others, Durrani was puzzled when he heard the blast site was washed down with fire hoses within an hour after the attack. "As well depriving investigators of evidence, this simply creates more suspicion," he says.
Mirza agrees. "Why would you remove evidence like that? What are they trying to hide?" she asks, wiping eyes swollen from days spent crying at Bhutto's funeral in rural Sindh. "She had been demanding security for months and they did not provide it. Why was that?"
Like everyone else in the PPP, Mirza believes there should be an outside investigation into Bhutto's death - similar to that carried out by the United Nations into the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. "We do not trust any official investigation by Pakistan. How could we trust these people?" she asks.
Outside the high-walled compound (named Bilawal House after Bhutto's teenage son and recently appointed political heir of the PPP), people queue to sign a book of condolences next to a huge framed photograph of Bhutto set on a table garlanded with roses and jasmine.
One of them, a medical student named Aftab Abbasi, proudly shows off a T-shirt identifying him as a member of the all-volunteer force of young men known as the Janisar-e-Benazir (those willing to die for her).
"I blame the government directly," he says. "They opposed her moves for democracy so they killed her. This idea that al-Qaeda is responsible is nonsense."