Bhutto Says Government Stole Election

Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said today she had lost Pakistan’s general election because of massive rigging by the caretaker government.

“They have stolen the (National) Assembly from us totally,” she told a news conference.

Bhutto said many of her polling agents had disappeared and reports from other party workers indicated that ballot boxes had been stolen on a massive scale.

She blamed the alleged corruption on President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who dismissed her in August, and the caretaker government he appointed.

Voters had turned out in unexpectedly small numbers today for the bitterly contested national election widely considered a referendum on the dismissal of Bhutto.

At least four people were killed and 11 injured in disputes involving rival parties, officials said. The monthlong campaign claimed at least a dozen lives.

Tens of thousands of heavily armed soldiers, paramilitary troops and police patrolled throughout the country during the voting. Today’s general elections were only the fifth in Pakistan since its 1947 inception, and never before was the military deployed in such large numbers during polling.

About 50 million people were eligible to vote, but election officials said turnout was light, perhaps reflecting cynicism about the future of democracy in Pakistan.

Earlier in the day, after casting her own vote in her ancestral hometown at Larkana, in southern Pakistan, Bhutto predicted victory for her party.

“We have turned the tables on them,” said Bhutto, who was unopposed in her bid for reelection to Parliament. “If we win, they will have no choice but to let us form the next government.”

Analysts had predicted that the vote would be close between Bhutto’s left-leaning Pakistan People’s Party and three smaller allied parties and the Islamic Democratic Alliance, a loose-knit coalition of 18 parties united only by their dislike for Bhutto and strained by individual ambitions.