Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto returned home knowing the names and cell phone numbers of her possible assassins, she wrote in a book finished just days before her murder at a December election rally.

Bhutto wrote in “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West,” to be released worldwide on Tuesday, that Pakistani officials told her four suicide bomber squads had been sent by Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud, Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza, and two militant groups to kill her.

“I had actually received from a sympathetic Muslim foreign government the names and cell numbers of designated assassins,” said Bhutto, who accused Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf of not doing enough to protect her or investigate the threats.

Bhutto, 54, who twice served as prime minister of Pakistan, said she sent a letter to Musharraf before returning to her homeland in October in which she identified people in the Pakistani intelligence service whom she said would be responsible for her assassination.

“I told him if I was assassinated by the militants it would be due to the sympathizers of the militants in his regime, who I suspected wanted to eliminate me and remove the threat I posed to their grip on power,” Bhutto wrote in the 318-page book published by News Corp.’s HarperCollins.

Bhutto survived a bomb attack — one of the deadliest in Pakistan’s history, killing at least 139 people — when she returned in October after an eight-year exile.

But she was killed after a bomb and gun attack at the end of a December 27 rally ahead of planned January 8 national elections. The polls are now due February 18.

“When I returned, I did not know whether I would live or die,” wrote the mother of three. “I said farewell to my children, husband, mother, staff, friends and family not knowing whether I would ever see their faces again.

“I wanted to reassure them, but I also told them, ‘Remember: God gives life, and God takes life. I will be safe until my time is up,’” said Bhutto, whose father, Pakistan’s first popularly elected prime minister, was hanged by the military in the late 1970s.

Musharraf’s government blamed al Qaeda for killing Bhutto, a staunch supporter of the U.S.-led campaign against Islamist militancy, but many Pakistanis suspect her other enemies, perhaps from within shadowy security agencies, were involved.

After the first attempt on her life, Bhutto wrote that “a cover-up seemed to be under way from the very first moments of the attack” that she said was “clearly meant to appear to be an al Qaeda-style suicide attack.”

“In Pakistan things are almost never as they seem. There are always circles within circles, rarely straight lines. This was meant to look like the work of al Qaeda and the Taliban, and I do not doubt they were involved,” she said.

“But the sophistication of the plan … suggested a larger conspiracy. Elements from within the Pakistani intelligence service had actually created the Taliban in the 1980s, and certain elements sympathized with al Qaeda ideologically and theologically. Some had recruited or worked for it,” she said.

Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, has now become the de facto leader of his wife’s Pakistan People’s Party. Together with his son and two daughters, they wrote an afterword for Bhutto’s book.

“This book is about everything that those who killed her could never understand: democracy, tolerance, rationality, hope, and, above all, the true message of Islam,” they wrote. “Or maybe they did understand these things and feared them, and thus feared her. She was the fanatics’ worst nightmare.”

Who killed Benazir Bhutto? How was it done? By bullet or bomb, or both? And who sent the killer - Islamic militants with links to Al Qaeda, rogue elements of the Pakistani Army, or political rivals in the election scheduled for Feb. 18?

Six weeks have passed since the assassination, and Pakistan seems no closer to a consensus on some of the most basic facts, making it ever more likely that the circumstances of Bhutto’s death will become grist for the political mills that grind remorselessly in that country, revitalizing the revenge and mistrust that have poisoned public life almost since the country’s founding in 1947.

So it was with the death of Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, hanged in 1979 and lauded or condemned as murderer or martyr ever since; so, too, with the death in 1988 of General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, at whose direction Bhutto was executed. Zia’s death in a plane crash - blamed variously on Islamic militants, rogue forces in the army, and scheming politicians (including Bhutto loyalists bent on revenge) - remains part of the morbid fabric of Pakistani politics.

On Friday, a Scotland Yard team released its findings after a two-and-a-half-week probe of Benazir Bhutto’s killing in Pakistan. The British experts found that “the only tenable cause” for her death was the severe trauma to her head suffered when a suicide attacker detonated his bomb as she tried to duck back into her armored Land Cruiser, ramming her head against the lip on the escape hatch.

From examination of body parts lifted from the scene of the attack, and video and still photographs of the killing, they also concluded that there had been one, not two, assailants; the man who fired the gunshots that caused Bhutto to duck was, they said, also the bomber.

But the chances that their findings will still the controversy over what happened in the Dec. 27 killing seemed slim. Bhutto family associates lost no time in raising objections; prominent among these, it seemed, was the fact that in one important respect the Scotland Yard experts’ conclusion tallied with that of Pakistan’s government: that Bhutto had died solely from the bombing, and had not been struck by a bullet.

Sherry Rehman, a close friend of Bhutto’s who was with her when she was killed, told the BBC that relatives and friends of the slain leader found it “difficult to agree” with that conclusion.

The British entered the investigation with several major handicaps, beginning with the grotesque bungling of the assassination’s immediate aftermath by the Pakistan authorities. There was no autopsy and no CT scan, and her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, rejected any suggestion of an exhumation, citing Islamic sensibilities.

There was little forensic evidence gathered at the scene, which was washed down within hours of the killing. The main forensic clue lay in X-ray photographs taken at the hospital where Bhutto was declared dead, showing only her head. In effect, Scotland Yard was left with deductions, not proof.

And the agreement between President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Gordon Brown limited the British team to helping establish the cause of Bhutto’s death, not the identity of the killer or killers, or who sent them. Those were issues, Musharraf insisted, for Pakistani investigators.

So it seemed sure that any conclusion the British reached would be heavily discounted in advance by Pakistanis who distrust the Musharraf government or seek, as in past political murders, to make political capital out of the killing.

But that was not all. The British carry considerable freight from their times as colonial rulers in the subcontinent, and they are rarely regarded as disinterested parties. In any dealings with Pakistan over police and security matters, their bona fides are bound to be questioned.

What is more, Britain has a home-grown problem with Islamic terrorism, much of it rooted in the discontent of young men of Pakistani origin raised in the grimy cities of the English Midlands and North, many of them the third generation of families that migrated in the 1950s and 1960s. The transit bombings in London that killed 52 people in July 2005 had links to militant madrasas in Pakistan that have had a powerful appeal to young British-born Pakistanis in search of identity.

So British counterterrorism officials have made close working relations with their Pakistani counterparts a priority.

All of those elements increase the chances that there will never be a resolution of this case in the public mind, but rather just the welter of claim and counterclaim now forming. In one sense, that is not surprising: In the contest within Pakistan’s political elite for power and wealth in a land of 160 million people with a crippling illiteracy rate, political mythology is a powerful tool, especially when it involves the violent death of a populist leader.

But before the Western world passes judgment, many Pakistanis would say, it might well look at its own manipulations, including the role the United States played in placing Bhutto on the path that led to that last rally in Rawalpindi.

For months, Washington had brokered contacts between Musharraf and Bhutto that aimed at having her return, win an election and lend a democratic facade to a government that would remain, in important ways, under military control. The plan matched American imperatives in the struggle against Al Qaeda, and U.S. officials who pushed for it saw little problem in encouraging Musharraf to grant an amnesty for Bhutto against corruption charges stemming from her time as prime minister.

But the Americans knew that she went home at enormous risk. When she spoke in Aspen, Colorado, at a lunch of prominent American political, business and media leaders only weeks before her death, talk at one table turned to the chances of an assassination.

“I’d say she’s a dead woman walking,” this reporter, long an acquaintance of Bhutto, said after talking to her about the hazards of going home.

“Yes,” a powerful Washington insider with close links to the administration replied. “We think so, too.”

Some of the toughest criticism of Pakistan’s pro-democracy movement comes from an unlikely source: the 25-year-old niece of Benazir Bhutto, who says Pakistani party politics do nothing but support military rule. It’s an environment, she said, her late aunt is partly responsible for.

Fatima Bhutto says she’s not interested in “perpetuating a really ineffectual form of politics … because of my name.”

“At this stage, we are in a state in Pakistan where so-called democratic forces are only interested in coming into office. So ultimately, they only prop up dictatorships,” she told CNN from her home in Karachi.

She raised her voice as she described what she feels is the core of Pakistan’s political problems: the lack of a true democratic culture. Instead, she said, the country is run by power grabbers.

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