Quotes of the Day

Benazir Bhutto had long been an outspoken critic of Pakistani militants and this made her the mortal enemy of a galaxy of extremist forces inside Pakistan. "Bhutto was the only Pakistani politician willing to stand up and say, 'I don't like violent terrorists,'" says Stephen Cohen, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Many of these groups have intertwining histories and common loyalties — as well as shadowy links with Pakistani intelligence. As the probe into her assassination begins, investigators will have to sort through a morass of violent groups that were gunning for Bhutto. And while all have some historic link to al-Qaeda, they have just as much ideological impetus to act on their own — or at the behest of rogue elements of the Pakistani government sympathetic to Islamic radicals.

In a briefing Friday, the Pakistani government emphasized that al-Qaeda had Bhutto in its sights. "As you all know, Benazir Bhutto had been on the hit list of terrorists ever since she had come to Pakistan," said Javed Iqbal Cheema, the Interior Ministry spokesman. "She was on the hit list of al-Qaeda."

According to reports from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, the suicide bomber who killed Benazir Bhutto belonged to a domestic terrorist organization with links to al-Qaeda called Lashkar-i-Jhangvi. The group is responsible for dozens of attacks inside Pakistan over the past decade including sectarian killings of Shi'ites and Christians, a failed 1999 assassination attempt against then-Prime minister Nawaz Sharif, and involvement in the kidnapping and beheading of the Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl. An FBI and Department of Homeland Security bulletin sent out Thursday cited unsubstantiated reports that Lashkar-i-Jhangvi had claimed responsibility for Bhutto's assassination. An FBI official said that the bulletin was based on press reports and would not comment on whether the claim had been independently confirmed.

On Friday, a Pakistani Ministry of Interior spokesman identified another suspect: Baitullah Mehsud, a Taliban leader and an influential tribal chief in Waziristan, a restive Pakistani province on the Afghan border. Pakistani intelligence services intercepted a supposed conversation in which Mehsud congratulated those who carried out the assassination. "Fantastic job," reads the transcript released by the Pakistan Ministry of Interior, "[They were] very brave boys who killed her." But a spokesman for Mehsud told the Associated Press on Saturday that the militant was not involved in the attack, calling the allegation "government propaganda."

In 2005, Mehsud had been party to an agreement with the Pakistani government to cease his protection of al-Qaeda in his region. The Pakistani government has since then considered the agreement to have been broken. Says Frederic Grare, a former French diplomat in Pakistan and a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "Mehsud is a very convenient [person to blame]. He’s the bad guy in the trouble areas." He asks, "Why would Mehsud be willing to kill Benazir? Beyond the stated fact that she’s against extremism. How do [Mehsud's people] benefit from Benazir’s assassination?"

It is not absolutely clear if or how Mehsud and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi link up. But both the Taliban and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi emerged from the two decades of fighting in Afghanistan, where eventually a Taliban regime would give refuge to al-Qaeda. Pakistani intelligence services were also active in Afghanistan, encouraging Muslim fighters in their war against the Soviet occupation of that country. One of the groups that emerged from this group was Lashkar-i-Tayyba or the "Army of the Pure," which Pakistani intelligence agents, after the end of the Afghan war, would redirect toward Kashmir and the Indian troops stationed in that disputed region. In January 2002, giving in to international pressure, the government of Pervez Musharraf finally kicked Lashkar-i-Tayyba out of Kashmir.

The group accused in Bhutto's killing, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, was also among the alphabet soup of militant groups that were spawned by the Afghan war.One of the most vicious of these groups called itself Sipah-e-Sahaba and used religious justifications for jihad from an austere sect of Islam called Deobandi, similar to the ideology of the Taliban. Sipah-e-Sahaba and similar groups believe that one obligation of "true Muslims" is to kill so-called apostates like Shi'ites. In the early 1990s, these veterans from the Afghan wars, with no more war to fight, launched a bloody sectarian campaign against Pakistani Shi'ites. In 1996, amid these attacks, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi was formed by a disgruntled member of Sipah-e-Sahaba who named his group after the martyred founder of Sipah-e-Sahaba, Haq Nawaz Jhangvi. (Lashkar is an Urdu word meaning Army, hence "The Army of Jhangvi.") In January 1998, four Lashkar-i-Jhangvi gunmen fired AK-47 machine guns on a Shi'ite wake in Mominpura cemetery near Lahore, killing 24 mourners.

The group has close ties to al-Qaeda. The leadership of Lashkar-i-Jhangvi fought alongside many high-ranking al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001. U.S. intelligence agencies believe many in its ranks trained in al-Qaeda-run camps in Afghanistan during the late 1990s. When al-Qaeda retreated from Afghanistan in 2002, many of its fighters are believed to have joined forces with Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and Lashkar-i-Tayyba, according to the State Department, which lists both groups as foreign terrorist organizations. Since then, the groups have targeted pro-Western entities of Pakistani society. In March 2002, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi retaliated against the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the resulting fall of the Taliban by launching a grenade attack on the International Protestant Church in Islamabad that killed 5 and injured dozens. In May, a car bombing outside a Karachi hotel killed 14, including 11 French defense technicians. Lashkar-i-Jhangvi is believed to have been behind it.

"It is probable there are links between Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and al-Qaeda," says Grare, "but it is certain they do have links to the government." He adds, "If the government itself says Lashkar-i-Jhangvi is involved, it is suicidal because it opens the door to speculation about their own role." Indeed, while Pakistani authorities have had a hand in encouraging groups like Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and Lashkar-i-Tayyba, Islamabad has done little to systematically dismantle these jihadist "armies" now that their original purposes — fighting the Soviets and supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan or fighting the Indians in Kashmir — are over. "They have nothing else to do," says Cohen, "and they are causing mischief." He adds: "It's like a cancer you've started elsewhere that comes back to eat you up."

• Brian Bennett