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SNAPSHOT - Latest developments in Pakistan blasts
18 Oct 2007 22:57:41 GMT
Source: Reuters
Oct 18 (Reuters) - A suspected suicide bomber killed 115 people on Friday in an attack targeting a vehicle carrying former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto through Karachi on her return from eight years in exile.

* Bhutto, 54, was unhurt and was been taken to her home. She had been resting inside the vehicle when the attack occurred.

* 115 people were killed and 100 people thought wounded.

* There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

* Blasts hit two police vehicles escorting her vehicle.

* Hundreds of thousands of supporters had turned out to greet Bhutto.

* Some 20,000 security personnel had been deployed to provide protection.

* The convoy had crawled for several hours along Karachi streets thronged with her supporters.

* Bhutto had ignored police advice to stay behind her trucks' bullet-proof glass for much of the trip from the airport.

* The truck had been designed to withstand a blast.

* She was on her way to a homecoming rally near the tomb of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

* Militants linked to al Qaeda had earlier this week threatened to assassinate her.

* Bhutto, had returned from self-imposed exile to lead her Pakistan People's Party into national elections meant to return the country to civilian rule.

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QUOTES:

TALIBAN COMMANDER:

* "She has an agreement with America. We will carry out attacks on Benazir Bhutto as we did on General Pervez Musharraf," Haji Omar, a Taliban commander in the Waziristan tribal region on the Afghan border, told Reuters by satellite telephone as Bhutto headed for Pakistan.

REUTERS PHOTOGRAPHER:

* Reuters photographer Athar Hussain was slightly wounded in the blasts. He described "a ball of fire" bursting into the air and disappearing after the first blast.

"There was another blast and it was more powerful, then I knew it was a bomb attack."

He saw a television cameraman running in front of him killed.

"Bodies were scattered all over and wounded were crying for help. No one went near the bodies out of fear that there could be another blast."

* BHUTTO BEFORE ARRIVING IN PAKISTAN:

"They might try to assassinate me. I have prepared my family and my loved ones for any possibility," she told the pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat newspaper.

(For related stories please double click on [ID:nISL245129])

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Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto speaks to supporters and the media from behind a barbed wire barricade outside her residence in Islamabad November 9, 2007. Pakistani police blocked opposition leader Bhutto from leaving her home in Islamabad on Friday and sealed off the capital and nearby city of Rawalpindi to stop a rally against Musharraf. REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood (PAKISTAN)



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