Dec 27, 2007 2:12 pm US/Pacific
Specter, Kennedy Were In Pakistan To Meet Bhutto
U.S. Lawmakers Advised To Leave Country Following Assassination
WASHINGTON (AP) ―
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Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I. was in Pakistan to meet with Musharraf and Bhutto at the time of the former Pakistani prime minister's assassination. (File)
AP
Two U.S. lawmakers scheduled to meet Thursday with former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and President Pervez Musharraf were advised to leave the country after Bhutto's assassination.
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said in a telephone interview from his Islamabad hotel room that he and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., were to dine with Musharraf and meet later in the night with Bhutto.
He said he heard about the attack on Bhutto as he was dressing for the dinner with Musharraf.
"Our foreign policy had relied on her presence as a stabilizing force," Specter said, emotionally describing her death as "a real, real, real shock."
"I knew her personally .... She was, as you know, glamorous, beautiful smart," he said. "Her loss is a setback. But you have to face what is. And now, without her, we have to regroup."
Kennedy said he was just leaving his hotel room for the dinner when someone advised him to check the television for news about Bhutto.
"I couldn't believe it," Kennedy said in a telephone interview from Pakistan. "You could really feel the tragedy of this loss because Bhutto really represented hope here for so many people."
Bhutto was shot to death Thursday in a suicide attack that also killed at least 20 others during a campaign rally in Rawalpindi. She served twice as Pakistan's prime minister between 1988 and 1996 and had returned to Pakistan from an eight-year exile Oct. 18 to seek the office again.
After learning that she was dead, Specter, Kennedy and Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, laid flowers under Bhutto's photograph at her campaign headquarters in what they described as an unsettling atmosphere. Specter said he felt apprehensive about being an American there out at night.
"They were crying and they were sobbing," Specter said, describing the people there. "It's a night reminiscent of Kennedy, Robert Kennedy's assassination."
Patrick Kennedy, son of Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Robert Kennedy's nephew, said they laid the flowers at Bhutto's headquarters because it was unsafe to do so at her residence.
Both lawmakers said turmoil was engulfing the country.
"Her death really dashed the hope of many here in Pakistan and that's why there's so much disillusionment and anger being vented through these protests that are lighting up the sky tonight as people set fires all over the countryside," Kennedy said.
The lawmakers said they were cutting short their trip by a day on the advice of the State Department.
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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