As with his life, the manner of his death has been a subject of great controversy right from the day of his execution in the now-demolished District Jail Rawalpindi on April 3/4, 1979.
Even the order for his execution was not an ordinary one. The then Punjab Home Secretary S. K. Mahmood issued an express order to the Provincial Prisons Department for the execution of Mr. Bhutto, which read:-
“The condemned prisoner Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, s/o Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto, should be hanged to death on April 4 at 2 am and relevant rules which debar the hanging at 2 am are hereby suspended.”
The Zia government announced he had been hanged according to the orders. However, many said that he was tortured to death before his hanging, and they were not necessarily his family members or supporters.
After Mr. Bhutto’s execution, the Daily Telegraph London correspondent present in Islamabad said in his report: “Senior public figures I have spoken to in the past few weeks seem persuaded that something went amiss that afternoon... It is believed that on the eve of his hanging, Mr. Bhutto was severely tortured in an attempt to extract from him a confession to the crime for which he was to be executed. It is claimed that the torture attempt failed, but that when he was taken to the gallows, Mr. Bhutto was already half dead.”
The Daily Express, London, ran a story on May 21, 1979, under the caption: Was Bhutto’s hanging a cover for murder?
In an exclusive story, Robert Eddison wrote that Zia asked army officers to extract a handwritten “confession” from Mr. Bhutto before he died.
“Mr. Bhutto was to admit ordering the murder of a one-time political opponent but he continually refused and two kicks killed him.
“The Army officers panicked, since his death had defeated their plan to hang him later that week. Zia ordered them to have his body carried to the gallows on a stretcher.”
And further: “Major Iftikhar Ahmad, a Cornier Pakistani army officer said in London that staff members of Rawalpindi jail had said in letters to the Bhutto family that they heard cries from Mr. Bhutto’s cell on the night of April 3. At 10 pm they suddenly ceased.”
Ms Benazir Bhutto writes in her autobiography Daughter of the East, in the chapter ‘The assassination of my father’:
“Rumours quickly began to circulate about my father’s death. He had been tortured almost to death and, with only the barest flicker of a pulse, had been carried on a stretcher to his hanging. Another persistent report claimed that my father had died during a fight in his cell.'
“I tended to believe this story. Why else had my father’s body shown no physical signs of a hanging?”
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