All those deaths, all that mystery

There are all the mysteries remaining unsolved. There are the questions which have not had answers. Perhaps we will never arrive at circumstances where our enquiries will be looked into, to our satisfaction. In a world where some of the strangest things have happened since time immemorial, it is not wise to expect every problem to be solved, for every doubt to be laid at rest.

Did Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose die in an air crash in Taipei on 18 August 1945? Or did he survive and was spirited away somewhere, and that at a time when the Japanese, his allies in his quest to free India from British colonial rule, had themselves been thoroughly defeated in the Second World War? We do not know. Neither are we certain that, as some have put it about, he was taken away to Stalin's Soviet Union and perhaps met his end there. But then, whose ashes are there at Renkoji temple in Tokyo, if they are not Netaji's?

Such questions assail us every livelong day. Think of the Moroccan dissident politician Mehdi Ben Barka, who simply vanished in Paris in 1965. The finger of suspicion has always been pointed at King Hassan, Morocco's ruler at the time. And when Ben Barka disappeared, Charles de Gaulle was President of France. And yet to this day there has been no trace of the Moroccan politician. He was obviously kidnapped and then done to death. Who were the elements involved in his disappearance?

Again, questions about Adolf Hitler's death have not quite gone away. He did have Eva Braun die through making her swallow cyanide and then shot himself. But no one saw their charred remains. Hitler, a raging megalomaniac till the last moment of his life, simply ceased to be. What happened to his ashes has never been known, though there have been people who have insinuated that his skull was turned into an ashtray for Stalin. Sounds improbable? Obviously. Conspiracy theories have always been part of history.

Go to China to seek answers to what happened there in September 1971. The story the world was treated to by Mao Zedong and his loyalists is that Lin Biao, the publicly designated successor of the Great Helmsman, fled Beijing with his wife and son once his conspiracy to overthrow Mao had been exposed. The aircraft carrying him and several others was headed for Mongolia but crashed, leading to their deaths. Did Lin really engage in conspiracy against his benefactor? Or was he trying to escape the viciousness into which the Cultural Revolution had degenerated? And whatever happened to Lin Biao's remains?

The mystery of who put an end to the life of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul a few years ago has never been solved, though suspicion fell on the powerful Crown Prince of the kingdom, where the Saud clan has ruled for decades. Again, despite all the assertions about Lee Harvey Oswald being the man who assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963, the reality is that no conclusive evidence has ever been emerged since the tragedy occurred. Oswald was killed by the night club owner Jack Ruby within a day of the JFK murder. Was Ruby too involved in the conspiracy? Did he mean to silence Oswald when he shot him?

Nearer home, doubts have always been voiced about the manner in which Zulfikar Ali Bhutto died in April 1979. Of course it was judicial murder committed by Pakistan's higher judiciary, in genuflection before the dictator Ziaul Haq. But was Bhutto tortured to death and then his corpse was hanged to show that the rules relating to execution had been maintained? Versions of Bhutto's end have varied, with no clear explanations having emerged. In the case of Ziaul Haq, many in Pakistan and elsewhere were relieved when he died in a plane crash in August 1988. Till today no explanation has come forth from either Pakistan or the US, whose ambassador too died with Zia, on how the C-130 aircraft carrying Pakistan's President and others simply exploded in the sky.

Mystery has been associated with the murder of Liaquat Ali Khan in Rawalpindi in October 1951. The man who shot him was quickly lynched and thus no evidence remained of the intrigue which may have gone into the death of Pakistan's first Prime Minister. Ironically, at the same spot in December 2007, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. Who was behind her killing or who ordered her murder has never been investigated, in that proper sense of the meaning, by the Pakistani authorities. To be sure, blame for Benazir's killing has often been placed at the door of the Taliban. But how can one be certain?

The death of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy in Beirut in December 1963 sparked strong reactions in Pakistan. Not many believed he died of a cardiac arrest, for they suspected foul play by the Ayub Khan regime against Pakistan's former Prime Minister. Foreign Minister Bhutto went on the record with his warning to Suhrawardy, not long before the latter's death, that he should not dare set foot in Pakistan. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the future Bangabandhu, remained convinced till the end of his life that Suhrawardy had been eliminated through conspiracy engineered by the Ayub regime in Rawapindi.

All this talk of conspiracies gets increasingly murkier when the mind travels back to the murder of the Philippine politician Benigno Aquino on the tarmac at Manila airport soon after his return from exile in 1983. Suspicion has been there of President Ferdinand Marcos' involvement in the assassination, but that suspicion has not led to any factual conclusions. Aquino's widow Corazon has served as the country's President and so has her son Benigno Aquino III.  But the mystery of the 1983 assassination has remained unsolved.

Did Salvador Allende take his own life or was he murdered by the army on 11 September 1973? Allende's last photo shows him with a helmet on his head and a gun in his hand. The common assumption is that he pulled the trigger on himself. However, there are people who believe that when Pinochet's soldiers stormed La Moneda, the presidential residence, they swiftly shot President Allende. The mystery thus has remained. 

Questions have also abounded about the manner in which the entire family of Afghan President Sardar Mohammad Daoud was killed when the communists seized power in Kabul in April 1978. And how did Hafizullah Amin, responsible for the killing of Nur Mohammad Taraki, perish once the Soviet Union decided to place Babrak Karmal in power in December 1979?

In the aftermath of the chaos engulfing Indonesia on 30 September 1965, General Suharto's soldiers seized D.N. Aidit, the widely respected leader of the PKI, the country's influential Communist party, and murdered him. Did Suharto sanction the murder? And where are Aidit's remains?

Questions. And then more questions. But few answers, if at all.

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