Demystifying death of former Pakistani President Ziaulhaq

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan The crash of C-130 plane near the Pakistani city of Bahawalpur, 531 kilometers (330 miles) south of Pakistani capital Islamabad on Aug. 17, 1988, killing country’s President and Army Chief Gen. Muhammad Ziaulhaq continues to remain shrouded in mystery. The crash also killed U.S. Ambassador Arnold Lewis Raphel and several other top Pakistani military officials. Over the past three decades, many people speculated about the sabotage, believing that explosives were hidden in a crate of mangoes loaded on the plane in Bahawalpur. But the Pakistani and the U.S. authorities have repeatedly denied and described the crash an accident. Now, 32-years later Muhammad Ijazulhaq, former Pakistani federal minister and son of Ziaulhaq claims that he has gathered evidence concluding that the plane came down due to spraying of nerve gas in the cockpit that maimed pilots. He also confirmed the presence of explosives in the mango crates, besides claiming that a projectile had also hit the plane. In an exclusive interview with the Anadolu Agency in his office in Rawalpindi, Ijazulhaq, who is writing a book on the subject said that conspirators did not want to leave anything to chance. He claimed that the role of former Army Chief Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, former National Security Advisor Gen. Mahmood Ali Durrani draws suspicion. He said that based on the evidence, that he has collected Indian and Israeli spy agencies were also involved in the killing of his father. Anadolu Agency: How you describe your father, former President and Army Chief of Pakistan Gen. Muhammad Ziaulhaq, as a family man? Muhammad Ijazulhaq (MI): My father Gen. Muhammad Ziaulhaq is known by people for his humility, his overly kind and generous disposition. He was a very friendly father also, more of a brother than a father. I regret that I was unable to spend as much time I wanted to be with him. I remained abroad to study and then working in London, Dublin, and Bahrain. We used to talk every day or at least three to four times a week on the telephone. But I was not able to spend the time which my other brothers and sisters spent with him. Q: When was the last time you met him? MI: I met him last on May 29, 1988, that is three months before his tragic death. I was in Canada with my family when I heard the news. It was shocking. Q: You must have followed the case. How this plane got crashed? Was it an accident or something else? MI: When the crash took place, we tried to vigorously pursue the case as much as we could. But the coverup was so strong and shrouded both from within and outside the country that we were unable to get to the webbed nitty-gritty. One thing was clear, that after the U.S.- Pakistan Air Force joint investigation, the Americans right from the beginning, tried their level best to prove that it was a mere accident. Some 34-35 pages of that report were released. Pakistan President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who took office after my father, announced in those days and that report confirmed that it was not an accident but sabotage. So, then we started looking into it. A team member of Pakistan air force investigating this case, was a very senior investigator in the air force - commodore at that time, which is equal to a brigadier in the army. He initiated some inquiries. He is dead now. His name was Air Commodore Zaheer Zaidi. He took parts of the plane without telling anybody to the top laboratory in Pakistan. His relative was the chairman at that time over there. So quietly, he got the chemical analysis done of the debris and contents like mango peels and other parts whatever he could get. His report established that it was a criminal act. A lot of antimony phosphorus etc. and other such things were found, which means that there was something wrong and some sabotage was done. Then we also came to know that there was not only an explosion. According to Zaidi, several acts were in place to ensure that if one fails, others will work. So, there was nerve gas which was kept in the cockpit of the plane which is so strong that it paralyzes the pilots. One of the theories which came to our knowledge was that it was the reason why the plane went up and down before hitting the ground as the pilots were paralyzed. They could not control. They were shaking. It is like when you slaughter an animal, and he tries to do some actions like that. It is said that the gas was kept in one of the trophies which were given to my father. They took it and kept it in the cockpit. Q: Who had given these trophies? MI: Some officers over there, who were part and in charge of the function. Zaidi appeared and recorded statement before one of the judicial commissions, namely the Shafiqur Rehman Commission. But the report of that commission has never been released. There were three commissions formed by the Pakistan government. The first one was the Bandial Commission which was formed by the then People’s Party government when Benazir Bhutto became the prime minister. They were never interested in finding out the truth. Q: Why they were not interested to get to the truth. After all, the president of the country had died. Was it an act of political revenge? MI: I think it was partly because of political revenge, partly because there was a pressure on them also. Q: Do you mean there was a kind of collaboration between the domestic and external actors? MI: There was a collaboration. Many actors involved were doing their bid, without knowing what the other person is doing, and even without cooperating among themselves. My father never wanted to attend this function because as army chief and also as president of the country, he was not supposed to attend. Any subordinate general from the army headquarters or the chief of general staff or maybe the chief of training could have gone there. Why the president? He was convinced to go by one of the senior officers who used to be close to him, requesting him again and again. He called our home 16 times according to the register which we had in the Army House. He was requesting my father to come and attend the function and play golf together. He repeatedly requested him to come and stay with him at Multan as his guest. Q: Who was he? MI: He was Gen. Mahmud Ali Durrani. He was a military attache in the Pakistani mission in Washington when he was a brigadier. And then he became the military secretary to my father for nearly two to three years before he went to command an armored division in Multan. Since this exercise was all under the Multan division, he was there in charge. There were many cover-ups. One was that postmortems of the bodies were stopped by an order from the high-up. Q: You mean that no autopsy was done? MI: Yes, no postmortem. The parts of the bodies were supposed to go to a laboratory in Lahore, which could do the analysis. But at the last moment, they were told not to do so. The only autopsy was done on the body of Brig. Gen. Robert Wossom who was the military attache in the U.S Mission, and died in the same plane. His postmortem was done because his body was supposed to return to the U.S. A military hospital in Multan had prepared to conduct autopsies of all 29 people, who died in the crash. But they were told not to go ahead. And the orders came right from the top. And then later on those officers and doctors working in that hospital were transferred to far-flung areas in Pakistan. Zaidi, who wrote a 100-page report was harassed. He later died. Q: Was it a normal death? MI: He died a normal death. But he was like, chased and threatened. I will not say which agency it was, but he used to tell us. He was a professional and a top investigator in Pakistan. He was thrown out of the air force and then not allowed to do any job, till one of his colleagues became head of the civil aviation authority in Pakistan. He hired him as an investigator for some time. Other than that, he lived a very miserable life. He gave me a 100 paged document written in his hand, which is with me. He gave me some other things also that he had on his desk. He had kept some of the reports outside Pakistan. He told those people with whom he had kept documents to release them if something happens to him. He did not give those documents to us. But the 100-page report, which he had prepared is with me and Inshallah I will publish it in my forthcoming book. Also, another very important aspect is that we had decided to sue Lockheed, a company that manufactures the C 130 aircraft that crashed. Q: That plane has four engines, in case of failure of three engines, one engine could still work, right? MI: Even in case of failure of all its four engines, it has the gliding capability. It will not crash. It is a very strong plane. When you open the back, you can take the tanks into it. So, we decided to prosecute this company for a billion dollars, because of their claim that it was a technical fault. We wanted to prove that it was not a technical fault. If it was a technical fault, then they need to pay us the money. We wanted them to say that it was not a technical fault, but sabotage. So, we hired a prominent New York-based lawyer a U.S citizen. He was very excited, initially. And he exclaimed that he has got the case of the century. He even went to the extent of allowing us to hold a press conference at his expense. And a few days after the announcement and his excitement that he has got the case of the century, his spirits dampened. When I met him, he said, that the head of the civil aviation authority of the U.S. had invited him for lunch. And soon after that, he never contacted us and did not take our calls even. Similarly, we also took on board Robin Raphel, wife of the deceased U.S. Ambassador Arnold Lewis Raphel. She also did not contact us later. She never spoke about this. The U.S. wanted to compensate her by making her an ambassador. Also, one more thing that I have mentioned and nobody has refuted it so far is that there was an air force officer held in Pakistan for espionage charges. His name was Akram Awan. He was jailed for a long time and then released. But let me tell you the brief story about Awan. He was arrested for espionage in May 1988. The accident took place in August after three months. He was in contact with the RAW [Indian intelligence agency] and Mossad [the national intelligence agency of Israel]. I hope you have heard the story that the Israelis in 1986, had tried to bomb Kahuta [a town near Islamabad, where Kahuta Research Laboratories, a nuclear research Lab, is located]. They could not execute the mission. But it was planned. The planning was in such an advanced stage that when Pakistan came to know, our fighters were in the air for 24 hours CAP (constant air patrolling). He was the one who was going to fly with the Israelis on the plane and to direct them to Kahuta.