PTI

London, Feb 4: In an autobiography, excerpts of which were published posthumously, former Pakistan Premier Benazir Bhutto has named the 16-year-old son of Osama Bin Laden as the leader of one of the four gangs of "designated assassins" who wanted to kill her in suicide attacks.

"I was told by both the Musharraf regime and a foreign Muslim government that four suicide bomber squads would attempt to kill me," she said in the autobiography, excerpts of which were carried by the The Sunday Times .

These were "squads sent by the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsuid; Hamza Bin Laden, a son of Osama Bin Laden; Red Mosque militants; and a Karachi-based militant group," she was quoted as saying.

Bhutto, who was killed on December 27 last year after addressing a rally in Rawalpindi, said President Pervez Musharraf's regime knew of the specific threats "against me, including the names and numbers of those who planned to kill me, and the names of others - including those in his own inner circle and in his party - whom we believed were conspiring."

"Despite our request, we received no reports on what actions were taken before my arrival (to Pakistan from self-imposed exile) as a follow-up to these warnings."

The naming of bin Laden's teenage son appears to bolster intelligence claims that Hamza is being groomed as a future leader of Al-Qaida.

Bhutto's book also describes how a suicide bomb attack on her motorcade in Karachi when she returned home last October may have been carried out by a would-be assassin who lined the clothes of a toddler with plastic explosive to turn the child into a bomb.

According to Bhutto, a man gestured to her to hold the child, before trying to hand it to police in a nearby van, which exploded soon afterwards.

"Later I was informed of a meeting that had taken place in Lahore where the bomb blasts were planned. According to this report, three men belonging to a rival political faction were hired for half a million dollars. They were, according to my sources, named Ejaz, Sajjad and another whose name I forget."

One of them died accidentally because he couldn't get away fast enough before the detonation, she said. "Presumably this was the one holding the baby. However, a bomb maker was needed for the bombs."