Bhutto's party sends appeal to UN to probe her assassination
January 16, 2008
The Associated Press
Original Source: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jGQYzguZ09ziCKNmbC2v9ORAlBvw
KARACHI (AFP) — Former slain Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party on Wednesday sent an appeal to the United Nations requesting it investigate her murder, a party official said.
Bhutto was assassinated in a gun and suicide bomb attack at an election rally in Rawalpindi on December 27 but conflicting government accounts of how exactly she died have angered her supporters.
We have sent today an appeal to the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon signed by our co-chairman Asif Zardari to form a UN-led commission to probe the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Farooq Naek, Bhutto's lawyer, said.
We have appealed to the UN secretary general and the Security Council to form a commission just like it was formed to probe Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri's murder, he said.
Naek said that in the appeal Bhutto's widower Zardari had expressed his no-confidence in the ability of the Pakistani agencies investigating the murder.
We have also written in the appeal that the government of Pakistan did not provide adequate security to Bhutto despite repeated demands, Naek said.
He said the government's claim Al-Qaeda was behind the attack merited the probe because the government had not disclosed in which country the plot was hatched.
Only an independent inquiry could go deep and answer all such questions, Naek said.
Zardari also touched on the involvement of British detectives from a Scotland Yard team into the assassination probe.
He has said in the appeal that Scotland Yard has a limited mandate of investigating only the cause of the murder and not finding out those behind the murder, Naek said.