PAKISTAN’S INTELLIGENCE services have been condemned in a devastating report by a United Nations inquiry into the assassination three years ago of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
The report failed to identify who was behind the assassination but concluded that Bhutto’s death could have been avoided if proper security measures had been in place. It also claimed the Pakistan police lied to a British forensic team from Scotland Yard in London that was called in to help.
However, aides to former president Pervez Musharraf angrily dismissed the report.
“There were two assassination attempts on President Musharraf by the same suicide squads that killed Benazir Bhutto. Are we saying that Mr Musharraf was responsible for the assassination attempts on himself?” said Rashid Qureshi, the former president’s spokesman. “It’s very strange.”
Fawad Chaudhry, Mr Musharraf’s lawyer, said that at the time of Bhutto’s death in December 2007, Mr Musharraf had handed over power to an interim government, which was overseeing elections, and had also given up his position of army chief.
“If there was any lapse, then it was the lapse of the interim government, not the president,” said Mr Chaudhry. “That’s like, in Britain, holding the queen responsible for someone’s murder.”
The intelligence services were heavily criticised over the mishandled investigation. “The investigation was severely hampered by intelligence agencies and other government officials, which impeded an unfettered search for the truth,” the report said.
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has long been controversial largely because some senior staff have been linked to the Taliban and other extremists.
Bhutto, who had returned earlier that year from political exile, was killed by a teenage suicide bomber in Rawalpindi in December 2007. A group linked to al-Qaeda was blamed.
The UN inquiry began in July last year, headed by the Chilean ambassador to the UN, Heraldo Muñoz, supported by Marzuki Darusman, a former attorney-general of Indonesia, and former Garda officer Peter Fitzgerald.
The 70-page report, which described the police’s behaviour as “deeply flawed”, concluded Bhutto could have been protected if adequate measures had been taken.
“The responsibility for Ms Bhutto’s security on the day of her assassination rested with the federal government, the government of Punjab and the Rawalpindi district police,” it said.
“None of these entities took the necessary measures to respond to the extraordinary, fresh and urgent security risks that they knew she faced.”
The damning part of the report rests in the UN team’s claim of a cover-up. It said it was “mystified by the efforts of certain high-ranking Pakistani government authorities to obstruct access to military and intelligence sources”.
A forensic team from Scotland Yard was involved in the investigation but the commission said it had to take much on good faith from the Pakistan police. The commission claimed the police had lied to Scotland Yard.
The commission was baffled that the Rawalpindi police hosed down the crime scene within an hour of the murder, destroying almost all potential evidence.
The ISI is one of the most powerful organisations in Pakistan, with a pervasive reach. The commission found that the ISI conducted a parallel inquiry into the killing, gathering evidence and detaining suspects.
The commission said it believed the failure of the police to investigate Bhutto’s assassination effectively was deliberate. “These officials . . . were unsure of how vigorously they ought to pursue actions, which they knew, as professionals, they should have taken.”
– (Guardian service)