I've been knocking for most of the day on these weird inconsistencies emerging in the accounts of the death of Benazir Bhutto; and now the biggs seem to be digging deeper. A number of clinicians who've written in today have said the government's story -- that Bhutto died because she basically knocked her head on the car sun roof while ducking to avoid the bullets -- is deeply implausible. A number of reasons are given, the most common of which is that you would have great difficulty generating enough force to inflict the kind of injury that would lead to death so quickly.

But when you step back and look at the constantly changing and mainly contradictory stories, you have to say, to what end? Other than a lot of confusion and irresponsible statements, what's the point of the different stories? Perhaps there's none. But the oddity of the final account -- that in so many words she died of a self-inflicted head injury when trying to duck gunfire -- comes not only from its improbability but from the level of detail.

The idea here, remember, is that you have a very chaotic and rapid chain of events that leaves Bhutto pronounced dead in less than an hour after the first shots were fired. With no post-mortem, which would seem necessary to conclusively identify the cause of death as this sort of head injury, they not only pronounce on the cause of death but even describe in some detail just how she came to have the head injury -- a blow to the head while trying to get away from gunfire.

To put it plainly, it simply seems incredible to me that they could have any real sense of how she got the head injury, even if they could establish, absent any clear evidence, that that was the cause of death.

And this suspicion is, I think, added to by the named accounts of doctors who actually treated her. This is from a late report from CNN ...

Dr. Mussadiq Khan of Rawalpindi General Hospital, who treated Bhutto before she was declared dead, said she had "a big wound" on the side of her head "that usually occurs when something big, with a lot of speed, hits that area."

The key details are there, something big at high speed. I guess 'big' is relative in this context, but that sounds a lot like she got shot or hit by a bomb fragment. And frankly, how likely is it that someone shoots at you several times at point blank range, near so (the video suggests no more than ten feet), and then detonates a bomb a few feet away from you and a few minutes later you're dead and it has nothing to do with either of those things?

I'd say, not likely.

But again, why?

From the current CNN headline story, I've seen what strikes me as the first explanation that makes sense of all facts ...

CNN national security analyst Ken Robinson, who worked in U.S. intelligence in Pakistan during the Clinton administration, said he suspects Bhutto's enemies are attempting to control her legacy by minimizing the attack's role in her demise.

"They're trying to deny her a martyr's death, and in Islam, that's pretty important," Robinson said.

Bhutto, he said, threatens to become more influential in death than she was in life. "Her torch burns bright now forever. She's forever young; she's forever brave, challenging against all odds the party in power and challenging the military and Islamic extremism."

Obviously, I have no idea beyond Robinson's surmise. But in a case like this I find myself looking for some explanation that makes sense of the seemingly nonsensical data. And this makes sense. The bonk on the head theory is ridiculous on many levels, not simply on that of implausibility, but because it makes her a potential object of ridicule, mockery and the manner of her death somehow ignoble. That would be a pretty harsh take, certainly; but they seem to play pretty rough over there.

For my money, if she happened to die in such a freakish manner in the process of an assassination attempt, it wouldn't diminish her heroism or bravery. But I would imagine many would see her death as tied in some way to cowardice and diminish, as Robinson says, any sense of her as a martyr.