Bhutto's party to seek U.N. probe if wins power

By Mark Bendeich
January 6, 2008 
Reuters
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSL06540714

KARACHI, Jan 6 (Reuters) - The party of slain Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto will call on the United Nations for an inquiry into her assassination if it forms a government after elections next month, a party spokesman said on Sunday.

The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) has aired deep suspicions over the motives and identities of Bhutto's assassins, who launched a gun and bomb attack against her at the end of a campaign rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi on Dec. 27.

If the PPP comes to power, we will ask the U.N. to hold an inquiry, said Farhatullah Babar, a senior official in Bhutto's party, who accuses the government of shielding the culprits.

The government's position on the assassination has been shifting from day to day.

The government blamed al Qaeda and initially said Bhutto was killed when the blast threw her head against the sun-roof lever of the car in which she was standing, despite TV footage showing a gunman firing at her head a split second before.

The official version, which also contradicted witness reports of gunshot wounds, has stoked suspicions among Pakistanis that government or military elements opposed to the transition to a civilian-led democracy were behind the attack.

On Saturday, CBS News quoted President Pervez Musharraf as conceding that a gunman might have shot Bhutto after all.

U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas said last week that if the Pakistani government asked for help with the investigation, the United Nations would consider all aspects of the request.

Musharraf said last week that Britain's Scotland Yard police would help Pakistan with the probe into Bhutto's death, but this fell short of the PPP's demand for a U.N. inquiry such as the one into the 2005 killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri.

The Scotland Yard team, if it contacts the PPP, we will extend its cooperation but we believe that the Scotland Yard investigation has already been circumscribed, Babar said.

He said Bhutto had named several people she suspected were out to kill her in a letter sent to Musharraf last month, but Babar said it was clear that those named would not be probed.

If the Scotland Yard team cannot investigate the people named in Mrs Bhutto's letter ... what use is an inquiry? he said.

Bhutto was buried the day after her killing, in keeping with Muslim custom, without a post mortem.

Her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, now the party's de facto leader, declined to comment on Sunday. He has not said yet whether the family would agree to the exhumation of Bhutto's body without the formation of a full U.N. inquiry.

I don't want to respond to anything at the moment, he said by phone from Dubai.

In an opinion article in Saturday's Washington Post, Zardari called for a new caretaker government to be named to oversee a national election that was postponed until Feb. 18 from Jan. 8. (Additional reporting by Kamran Haider; editing by Myra MacDonald)





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