2002 Karachi bus bombing

The 2002 Karachi bus bombing was one of a series of deadly strikes on Westerners in Pakistan in 2002.

Details
On May 8, 2002, a man driving a car bomb stopped next to a bus in Karachi outside the Sheraton Hotel. He detonated the car, ripping the bus apart, and killing himself, 11 Frenchmen, and two Pakistanis. The 11 Frenchmen were engineers working with Pakistan to design an Agosta 90B class submarine for the Pakistani Navy. About 40 others were wounded.

Al-Qaeda was blamed for the blast. On September 18, 2002, a man named Sharib Zubair, who was believed to have masterminded the attack, was arrested. In 2003, two men were sentenced to death for the bombing by a Karachi court. The suspected bombmaker, Mufti Mohammad Sabir, was arrested in Karachi on September 8, 2005. There were several convictions in the case, though Pakistani courts have acquitted three defendants by 2009.

Karachigate
Contrary to official announcements by both the Pakistani and French governments at the time, it is now thought unlikely that those responsible for the attack had links to al-Qaeda. French magistrates believe that the attack was orchestrated by Pakistani intelligence and military officials in retaliation for the failure of the French to pay them $33 million that had been previously agreed upon. The resulting scandal has been dubbed "Karachigate".

An investigation is currently underway in France in order to establish the extent to which former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur and former President Nicolas Sarkozy were implicated in the sale of kickbacks to Pakistan officials. Sarkozy was allegedly involved in accepting kickbacks from Pakistan to fund the presidential campaign of Balladur. When Jacques Chirac came to power, he cancelled the Pakistani official's kickbacks, angering those in that country.