In an autobiography being published after her assassination, Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto says she was warned that four suicide bomber squads would try to kill her, one led by Osama bin Laden's 16-year-old son.

The former Pakistan prime minister, who was killed in Rawalpindi in December while campaigning for elections, wrote that Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf and a "foreign Muslim government" had informed her these squads were planning her murder, according to excerpts of the book, which is to be published on Feb 12.

"I was told by both the Musharraf regime and the foreign Muslim government that four suicide bomber squads would attempt to kill me," Bhutto says in the book, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy & the West.

As well as Hamza bin Laden, she said bombers were squads sent by the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud; Red Mosque militants; and a Karachi-based militant group."

Pakistan has accused Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban Movement of Pakistan, of masterminding Bhutto's murder, although he denies it.

The excerpts, first reported by The Sunday Times of London, were confirmed by The Associated Press, which obtained an uncorrected proof of the book.

The Sunday Times said the naming of bin Laden's teenage son, Hamza, could add weight to reports he is being groomed as Al-Qaida's future leader.

Hamza, then only 10, featured in a joint Taliban and Al-Qaida video shot in 2001 of a militant attack on a Pakistan army camp in South Waziristan, a militant stronghold near the Afghan border. In September, he was described in reports as a senior Al-Qaida leader who had been waging a jihad, or holy war, in the lawless tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Even before Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October after eight years in exile, she was warned suicide squads were targeting her. Bhutto had complained that her life remained in danger and that Musharraf's government was not giving her proper protection.

Suicide bomber kills 5

A suicide bomber attacked a Pakistani military bus taking medical corps staff to work in the garrison city of Rawalpindi yesterday, killing himself and four military personnel, security officials said.

It was the seventh suicide bomb blast in Rawalpindi, where the army has its headquarters, in the past six months.

Agencies

(China Daily 02/05/2008 page11)