WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
REFLECTIONS: Volume XXII, No 3, Fall 2005
Who Killed Zia?
Barbara Crossette*
Of all the violent political deaths in the twentieth century, none with such great interest to the United States has been more clouded than the mysterious air crash that killed President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan in 1988, a tragedy that also claimed the life of a serving American ambassador and most of General Zia's top commanders. The list of potential malefactors has grown as the years have passed, compounding the mysteries buried in this peculiar, unfinished tale.
The one unarguable fact is that no serious, conclusive, or even comprehensive inquiry into the crash has been undertaken in the United States, although one of its top diplomats, Arnold Raphel, and an American general were killed*and in an Americanbuilt aircraft. Congress held a few hearings, but the FBI was kept away from the case for a year. No official report was made public. Indeed, a file in the National Archives containing about 250 pages of documents on the event is still classified secret.
The undisputed facts about the crash of the Pakistani president's specially outfitted Lockheed C-130 aircraft on August 17, 1988, are not many. Even some of those "facts" are still in dispute and can be called up to stoke suspicions of the United States in South Asia.
* Barbara Crossette was the New York Times bureau chief in South Asia from 1988 to 1991.
For Complete Text, see:
http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj05-3/crossette.html
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