Another couple of pages from Peter Lance's Triple Cross

Driven by a combination of greed and revenge, that summer Yousef accepted a contract from the Army of the Companions of the Prophet (Sipah-e-Sahaba), a sect of Sunni Muslim extremists, to assassinate the most famous woman in Pakistan. At the time, Benazir Bhutto, the glamorous, Oxford-educated daughter of the former prime minister, was campaigning for the office once held by her father, Zaulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In the 1970s, the elder Bhutto had suppressed an uprising of Baluchistanis that reportedly led to as many as ten thousand deaths. The senior Bhutto was overthrown in a coup by General Zia-ul-Haq who was backed by Islamic extremists. The elder Bhutto was hanged by Zia's regime in 1979, but Yousef never forgot the attack, and by August he accepted three million Pakistani rupees - roughly sixty-eight thousand US Dollars - to make the hit. With the help of his old friend Abdul Hakim Murad, the commercial pilot who had trained in four US flight schools, Yousef attempted to plant an improvised explosive device in a storm drain outside Bhutto's residence in the Clifton district of Karachi. But when it exploded prematurely, the bomb maker was almost killed and he suffered permanent eye damage. Despite his wounds, within weeks the ever-ambitious Yousef was plotting to shoot Bhutto with a high-powered rifle, Manchurian Candidate-style. But that plan too was thwarted. The following June, demonstrating his willingness to challenge the Al Qaeda leadership, which had recently brokered a detente with Hezbollah, Yousef planted a bomb at the Mashed Reza Shiite mosque in his home province. It killed twenty-six worshippers, most of them women. In the late summer of 1994, even as Yousef was recuperating from the Bhutto blast, bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and the rest of the Al Qaeda leadership decided to use him to carry the jihad to new levels of terror. The bomb maker was called on to establish a cell with his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah, a thirty-eight-year-old Uzbeki hero of the Afghan campaign, whom bin Laden revered and referred to by the nickname "the Lion."