UN Report on Benazir Bhutto's Assassination

ajtr

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As world awaits report

LAHORE: As Pakistan and the world wait for the UN report on Benazir Bhutto's assassination today (Thursday), it has been revealed that the Punjab police had already told the UN Inquiry Commission that the murderers of Benazir had been traced, arrested and are being tried.

Her assassination was an open and shut case for the Punjab police, which had instantly solved it way back in February 2008 by tracing the mastermind of the Liaquat Bagh suicide attack as well as the suicide bomber, who had blown himself up on December 27, 2007 in Rawalpindi, the UN has been told.

Whether the UN report takes this investigation into account and how much importance it is given will be seen in the report of the UN commission.

According to well informed diplomatic sources in Islamabad, the United Nations Inquiry Commission, headed by Heraldo Munoz, was informed by the CID officials during the course of its investigations that the assassination of Benazir Bhutto had been masterminded by the slain Ameer of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) Commander Baitullah Mehsud and the bomber, who exploded himself outside the Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi, was one Saeed alias Bilal, a resident of South Waziristan Agency.

According to official documents provided to the UN Inquiry Commission by the CID Punjab, a group of 12 militants was actually dispatched to the garrison town of Rawalpindi, a day prior to Benazir Bhutto's December 27, 2007 election rally, to physically eliminate the PPP leader, who was touring Punjab in connection with her party's election campaign. The FIR of the Benazir Bhutto murder case was registered by the Rawalpindi police under sections 302/324,435,436,120-B/4/5ESA,7/ATA while investigations were carried out by the Additional Inspector General CID Punjab Chaudhry Abdul Majeed.

According to the CID documents, four of the 12 militants tasked to kill Benazir Bhutto belonged to Madrassa Haqqania in Akora Khattak near Peshawar, which is also referred to as Darul Uloom Haqqania. The Madrassa is being run by Maulana Samiul Haq, the pro-Taliban Ameer of his own faction of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam. Three of the 12 TTP militants have been shown in the CID documents as already killed, including the suicide bomber. Of the remaining nine accused, five have already been arrested by police while the remaining four are still at large.

Additional Inspector General of the CID Punjab, Malik Mohammad Iqbal, when asked if the Punjab CID still owns its findings into the Benazir Bhutto murder case, said the assassination inquiry was actually conducted by a Joint Investigation Team (JIT), which was headed by the then additional DIG CID and representatives of the Rawalpindi police.

He said it was a joint probe on the basis of which the challan of Benazir Bhutto murder case had been submitted with a Rawalpindi anti-terrorism court, which still holds ground and the trial of the arrested accused is still on.

The three accused shown as already dead include the human bomb Saeed alias Bilal (r/o Waziristan), Nadir alias Qari Ismail (r/o Madrassa Haqqania, Akora Khattak) and Nasrullah r/o Madrassa Haqqania, Akora Khattak). Four other accused in the Benazir Bhutto murder, who are still at large and have already been declared proclaimed offenders include Ikramullah r/o South Waziristan, Abdullah alias Saddam r/o Mohmand Agency, Faiz alias Kiskit, an ex-student of Madrassa Haqqania, Akora Khattak and Abdur Rehman alias Noman alias Usman, an ex-student of Madrassa Haqqania.

The remaining five accused already in the custody of the Rawalpindi police and being tried for the Benazir Bhutto murder include Rafaqat, Hasnain Gul, Sher Zaman, Rasheed Ali and Aitzaz Shah.

According to the findings of the CID, Baitullah Mehsud had given Rs 400,000 to one Qari Ismail, who subsequently dispatched a group of suicide bombers and shooters to Rawalpindi to kill Benazir Bhutto.

The UN Commission was told by some senior CID officials that the TTP militants had planned to target Benazir Bhutto in different cities, wherever she was going in connection with her campaign, until she was finally killed.

According to the CID narrative, 15-year-old Aitzaz Shah from the Mansehra district of the NWFP, and his co-accomplice Sher Zaman, reportedly trained at Miramshah, were the first ones to be arrested after the Benazir Bhutto murder from Dera Ismail Khan by a joint investigation team of the Punjab police, headed by Chaudhry Abdul Majeed. Two more suspects, Hasnain Gul and Rafaqat, were later arrested from Rawalpindi. Rasheed Ali was the last one to be nabbed but Aitzaz was the first one to have furnished some vital information to his interrogators pertaining to the Benazir murder.

As the police obtained physical remand of the arrested accused and broadened the scope of investigations, it was learnt that Aitzaz Shah had actually obtained Jihadi training from a well known Deobandi religious school in Karachi — Jamia Binoria, also referred to as Jamia Islamia and known for its pro-Taliban leanings. As per the CID report, after being brainwashed and trained to kill, Aitzaz was sent to South Waziristan from where he had travelled to Darul Uloom Haqqania Madrassa in Akora Khattak. Afterwards, Aitzaz was taken to a Jihadi training centre in Akora Khattak - Wali Mohammad Markaz and tasked with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

According to the CID findings, Baitullah had provided Rs 50,000, a suicide jacket and other necessary items to someone else, but he could not attack Benazir Bhutto. After his suicide bombers' failure to hunt down the PPP chairperson in Karachi, Peshawar and other places, Baitullah Mehsud had assigned Qari Ismail of Akora Khattak and given him Rs 400,000 to execute the Benazir assassination plan. After reaching the Rawalpindi bus stand on December 26, the assailants had stayed at a Quaid-i-Azam colony house. In the evening, they visited the Liaquat Bagh site in a taxi and decided after surveying the area to hit their target from different directions during or after the public meeting.

As per the assassination plan, Saeed alias Bilal was to carry out the suicide attack in case he failed to shoot down Benazir while Ikramullah was to detonate himself if Saeed failed. Both Saeed and Ikramullah were provided logistics by Hasnain Gul, including an explosive-laden suicide jacket, a pistol and an optical device.

The assailants had reached the Committee Chowk in a taxi and later gone to the Liaquat Bagh via Iqbal Road and College Road. An unarmed militant went inside the Liaquat Bagh to give his accomplices updates about the movement of Benazir Bhutto, especially about her arrival and departure from the venue of the rally. As per the CID claims, the assailants had first attempted to enter the Liaquat Bagh to carry out a suicide attack close to the stage, but they had failed in their designs, chiefly due to foolproof security arrangements.

The UN Commission was further informed that several suicide bombers and sharp shooters were waiting for the PPP leader at the crime scene outside the Liaquat Bagh after their failure to enter the venue. Going by the CID account, the assailants had started chasing Benazir Bhutto as soon as she came out of the Liaquat Bagh and it was none other than the fearless PPP chairperson, who actually provided them with a golden opportunity to target her, when she decided to come out of her bullet proof vehicle Toyota Land Cruiser from its sunroof to wave to her cheerful supporters. That was the time gunshots were fired, aiming at Benazir Bhutto. As Saeed alias Bilal failed to hit Benazir Bhutto, he blew himself up, killing the PPP leader and 23 others, mostly on the spot. However, the Dopatta, which Benazir Bhutto was wearing at the time of the blast, could not be traced despite frantic efforts by the investigators.

Narrating the motivation of the crime, the CID findings say the accused had said during interrogations that they were annoyed over the pro-West approach of Benazir Bhutto who had returned to Pakistan at the behest of some foreign powers and, therefore, they feared a strong government action against the militants if she was allowed to come to power after the elections.

However, the fact remains that much before coming to power after the 2008 general elections; the PPP leadership had rejected the confession made by Aitzaz Shah and his other accomplices about their involvement in the Benazir Bhutto murder.

The then PPP spokesman and now presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar had described Aitzaz's confession a cock and bull story intended to reduce pressure on the Musharraf regime, saying the arrested youth, who has already been declared a juvenile by the court, had been made to narrate exactly the kind of things the Pakistani authorities wanted to hear, backing up their earlier conclusions reached within hours of the Benazir Bhutto killing.

The trial of the five accused in Benazir Bhutto murder case was deferred on August 22, 2009 by the Rawalpindi anti-terrorism court following a federal government request to transfer the case to the Federal Investigation Agency so as to enable it to arrive at a definitive conclusion. Subsequently, on August 25, 2009, the federal government had formed a high-level team to re-investigate the Benazir murder.

The Special Investigation Group of the FIA was assigned the task to fix criminal liability on the assassins and planners of the gun-and-bomb attack on Benazir Bhutto. It was announced that the SIG's investigation would be parallel to the probe being carried out by the United Nations Inquiry Commission.

"The main reason for the fresh probe is that the inquiry report to be prepared by the UN Commission can't be presented before any court of law as desired by the UN. The government requires a separate investigation report for a proper trial against the criminals in the court", a senior FIA official had said on August 25 in Rawalpindi, adding that the United Nations report would have no legal standing and it could not be used for prosecution.

When this correspondent tried to take version of Jamia Binoria, Karachi, no responsible person was found. However, the person present there termed the Punjab police-CID report malicious and baseless. Expressing similar sentiments, a person in Madrassa Haqqania, Akora Khattak, said this report is part of the campaign to discredit religious schools.
 
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plugwater

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U.N. report: Benazir Bhutto's assassination was preventable

United Nations (CNN) -- Pakistan's military-led government failed to protect former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto before her 2007 assassination, and intelligence agencies hindered the subsequent investigation, a U.N. commission concluded Thursday.

The three-member investigative panel issued a scathing report Thursday afternoon, concluding that the suicide bombing that killed Bhutto "could have been prevented" and that police deliberately failed to pursue an effective investigation into the killings.

Bhutto had returned from a self-imposed, eight-year exile to run in the country's general elections two months before her assassination and had already escaped one attempt on her life. She was killed by a 15-year-old suicide bomber while campaigning in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, the seat of the country's military, in December 2007.

"No one believes that this boy acted alone," the report states. "A range of government officials failed profoundly in their efforts first to protect Ms. Bhutto, and second to investigate with vigor all those responsible for her murder, not only in the execution of the attack, but also in its conception, planning and financing."

Pakistan's government and the CIA blamed the killing on Baitullah Mehsud, a top Pakistani Taliban leader with ties to al Qaeda. Mehsud was killed last year in a suspected U.S. drone strike.

While Thursday's report did not point fingers at any particular culprit, it found that police failed to preserve evidence at the scene of the bombing and said the investigation "suffered from a lack of commitment to identify and bring all of the perpetrators to justice." In particular, the "pervasive reach" of Pakistan's intelligence agencies left police "unsure of how vigorously they ought to pursue actions, which they knew, as professionals, they should have taken," it states.

There was no immediate response to the report from the Pakistani government, now led by Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari.

The U.N. commission's chairman, Chilean U.N. Ambassador Heraldo Munoz, said the panel's role was "fact-finding" and not prosecutorial. Asked whether the failure to protect Bhutto was deliberate, he said, "it is not up to us to make inferences."

But he added, "It is clear that warnings were passed on, on various occasions, and Ms. Bhutto received also information in this regard from outside Pakistan.

"Nevertheless, what we have found is that the passing of information was not accompanied by commensurate measures to protect her, particularly given the fact that an assassination attempt had been made against her the very day she returned to Karachi," he said.

Nationwide polls conducted shortly after Bhutto's death found that a majority of Pakistanis believe the government of the country's military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was complicit in the assassination. Bhutto's supporters took to the streets after her killing, with the ensuing riots leaving 58 dead and inflicting more than $200 million in damage.

Bhutto's return to Pakistan came amid a power struggle between the country's political leaders and Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup. At the same time, the country was besieged by a surge of attacks by Islamic extremists. On her first night back in her homeland, a pair of bombs went off near her armored truck, killing 149 people and wounding more than 400.

Further heightening tensions, Musharraf declared a state of emergency in November 2007, suspending the constitution, sacking the country's chief justice for a second time and imposing what amounted to martial law. Thursday's report criticized the influence of Pakistan's intelligence agencies in the country's government, including efforts to influence elections and the courts.

"This pervasive involvement of intelligence agencies in diverse spheres, which is an open secret, has undermined the rule of law, distorted civilian-military relations and weakened some political and law enforcement institutions," it states. "At the same time, it has contributed to wide-spread public distrust in those institutions and fed a generalized political culture that thrives on competing conspiracy theories."

Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party went on to win the most number of seats in elections held the in 2008, and Musharraf resigned. Zardari asked the United Nations to look into his wife's death after taking office, and he was one of the more than 250 people interviewed by the commission.

Bhutto faced threats from "a number of sources," including al Qaeda, the Taliban and local Islamic militants and "potentially" from Pakistan's ruling establishment, the report states. Two months before her death, she wrote a letter to Musharraf that identified three people she considered threats to her safety. But Pakistan's investigation failed to investigate Mehsud, al Qaeda or other organizations that might have been involved, according to the U.N. report.

"Investigators also dismissed the possibility of involvement by elements of the establishment, including the three persons identified by Ms. Bhutto as threats to her in her 16 October 2007 letter to General Musharraf," the report states.

U.N. officials said the question of whether to reopen a criminal investigation into Bhutto's assassination now lies with Pakistan.

"We cannot accuse or absolve anyone," Munoz said. "That is not our task. That is the task of the competent authorities in Pakistan."

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/04/15/pakistan.bhutto.report/index.html
 

ajtr

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Report on Bhutto assassination rips Pakistani government, security agencies

Posted By Colum Lynch Thursday, April 15, 2010 - 7:57 PM Share

Pervez Musharraf's military government failed to fulfill its responsibility to protect former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in the hours leading up to her December 2007 assassination, or to vigorously investigate her killing by a 15-year-old suicide bomber, according to a U.N. fact-finding commission of inquiry.

The three-member U.N. commission, headed by Chilean diplomat Heraldo Muñoz, also accused unnamed high-ranking Pakistani authorities of obstructing the commission's access to military and intelligence sources.

The 65-page report (pdf) -- which relied on interviews with 250 people and several key governments -- provided a blistering account of government lapses that led to one of the most significant political assassination in a generation. In one of its most damning passages, it accused police investigators of deliberately seeking to avoid solving the case out of fear of discovering the possible involvement of Pakistan's intelligence agencies.

"Ms Bhutto's assassination could have been prevented if adequate security measures had been taken," the report stated. It said that none of Pakistan's local or national security authorities "took the necessary to respond to the extraordinary, fresh and urgent security risks that they knew she faced."

The report also harshly critiques Bhutto's political party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), for failing to provide adequate back-up security for the former Pakistani leader. Many of those individuals are now in the government of Bhutto's husband, President Ali Asif Zardari, who was partly involved in overseeing his wife's security.

But the report charges Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik, who was responsible for providing supplemental security on the day of the attack, with fleeing the scene of the explosion, leaving Bhutto's vehicle isolated, a decision that amounted to "a serious security lapse."

"The commission recognizes the heroism of individual PPP supporters, many of whom sacrificed themselves to protect her; however, the additional security arrangements of the PPP lacked leadership and were inadequate and poorly inadequate."

The sharply worded tone of the report appeared to take Pakistani authorities by surprise. Minutes after a copy was presented to the Pakistan's U.N. ambassador Abdullah Haroon, he cancelled a scheduled press conference and announced he would be traveling back to Pakistan to hand-deliver the information to his government.

The Dec. 27, 2007, attack took place as Bhutto was leaving a campaign rally in a neighborhood in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. She died after the force of the explosive forced her head into the handle of an escape hatch of a campaign vehicle. Twenty-four other people were killed in the attack and another 91 were injured.

The commission found that local police "inflicted irreparable damage to the investigation" by hosing down the crime scene hours after Bhutto's assassination and failing to collect evidence. It also challenged the Pakistani government's assertion, made in a press conference shortly after Bhutto's assassination, that a Taliban militant, Baitullah Mehsud, was the mastermind behind the killing. It said that telephone intercepts provided by the Intelligence-Services Intelligence, the powerful Pakistani spy agency, were too ambiguous to prove Mehsud's role in the attack.

The U.N. commission said that the police investigators focused primarily on low-level operatives and ignored potential suspects "further up the hierarchy in the planning, financing and execution of the assassination." It also said the investigation was "severely hampered" by Pakistan's intelligence agencies, which conducted a parallel investigation and selectively shared information with the police.

"The commission believes that the failure of the police to investigate effectively Ms. Bhutto' assassination was deliberate," the commission concluded. And it called on the Pakistan "to carry out a serious, credible, criminal investigation that determines who conceived, ordered and executed this heinous crime of historic proportions, and brings those responsible to justice."
 

ajtr

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Whole 65-page report can be read here.

Report of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry into the facts and circumstances of the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto

This report opens a can of worms. The official UN report says:

"The Pakistani military organised and supported the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan in 1996. Similar tactics were used in Kashmir against India after 1989. These policies resulted in active linkages between elements of the military and the Establishment with radical Islamists, at the expense of national secular forces . . .Therefore, a discussion of the threats to Ms Bhutto and of the forces that felt threatened by her potential return to power in Pakistan must include the following: Al-Qaida, Taliban and local jihadi groups and elements of the Establishment."

. . . "The Pakistani military and ISI also used and supported some of these groups in the Kashmir insurgency after 1989. The bulk of the anti-Indian activity was and still remains the work of groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has close ties with the ISI,"

. . . "A common characteristic of these jihadi groups was their adherence to the Deobandi Sunni sect of Islam, their strong anti-Shia bias, and their use by the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies in Afghanistan and Kashmir," . . .

"It was such links and connections between elements in the intelligence agencies and militants, which most concerned Bhutto and many others who believed that the authorities could activate these connections to harm her. Given their clandestine nature, any such connection in an attack on her is very difficult to detect or prove,"

"the ISI cultivated these relationships, initially in the context of the Cold War and the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980's and later in support of Kashmiri insurgents. While several Pakistani current and former intelligence officials told the Commission that their agencies no longer had such ties in 2007, virtually all independent analysts provided information to the contrary and affirmed the ongoing nature of many such links."
 
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ajtr

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UN blames Musharraf govt for Benazir Bhutto's murder

NEW YORK: A three-member United Nations commission investigating the events and circumstances surrounding Benazir Bhutto's assassination has blamed the government of former president Pervez Musharraf for the murder, saying it failed to provide adequate a security cover to the former prime minister.Although no functionary of the former government has been accused of complicity in the murder, the 65-page report has blamed Pervez Musharraf's government, particularly its police and security network of negligence.

It said the present government was free to carry out further investigations and bring those responsible for the crime as well as negligence to justice.

The three-member panel, headed by Chilean ambassador Heraldo Munoz, submitted its report to UN Secretary General Ban ki Moon on Thursday afternoon. He immediately handed it over to Pakistan's UN envoy Hussain Haroon. However, at the eleventh hour Islamabad decided against making its content public before the findings were studied by senior government officials.

Senior officials of Pakistan's mission had earlier indicated that on receiving the UN Commission's report Ambassador Hussain Haroon would share its findings at a news conference.

However, the media event was postponed at the last minute and it was announced that the findings would now be made public in Islamabad by senior members of the government. Still, the UN secretariat decided that it was too important a report to be kept hidden from the public, and at a hurriedly arranged news conference made the report public.

As people in Pakistan waited eagerly for the release of the findings of the UN probe body, security in the country was beefed up, with United Nations mission in Pakistan advising its staff to act cautiously and avoid going to public places.

Though details contained in the report were not known, UN officials stationed in Pakistan were not prepared to take any chances, fearing a possible backlash.

Pakistani officials said police and paramilitary troops were on high alert, and security was being stepped up outside the foreign missions and UN office, but only as a precautionary measure.

In Islamabad, a senior official earlier said there were no startling revelations in the report. The 3-member probe body headed by the Chilean ambassador to the UN has mostly relied on evidence collected by talking to the same set of officials and other people who had already made their views public. Analysts say its hard to believe that the Un panel would clear state its views on any major conspiracy involving state or non-state actors in the assassination.

The UN panel was to hand over its report on March 30 but on the request of the Pakistani authorities it delayed release by two weeks.

An official of the UN told the media in New York that despite this delay no fresh detatils were inserted into the report.


"¢ UN probe was "hampered" by Pakistani intelligence

"¢ Police failure to probe the assassination "deliberate"

"¢ Security arrangements were "fatally insufficient"

"¢ Several conspiracy theories have been circulating since the assassination

"¢ Need for criminal investigation to look into the role of Al Qaeda, Taliban, and what is known in Pakistan as "establishment"

"¢ Declaration by government that Benazir was killed by a hatch of the vehicle, and that Baitullah Mehsud was responsible were premature, and before proper investigation

"¢ Hosing of the area of bomb blast and failure to conduct post-mortem badly affected investigation. Officials and their superior responsible

"¢ Responsibility of the present government to carry out serious investigation to bring the conspirator and perpetrator of the crime to justice.
 

nitesh

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what a farce:

http://beta.thehindu.com/news/international/article398917.ece

Pakistan said Friday police would launch a new probe into the assassination of Benazir Bhutto after a U.N. report blamed security forces for failing to protect her – accusations dismissed as a "pack of lies" by an aide to ex-President Pervez Musharraf. .......................
 

ajtr

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Well they already hosed all the evidence with in hours of assassination down the gutter
 

ajtr

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Report on Bhutto assassination rips Pakistani government, security agencies

Posted By Colum Lynch Thursday, April 15, 2010 - 7:57 PM Share
Pervez Musharraf's military government failed to fulfill its responsibility to protect former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in the hours leading up to her December 2007 assassination, or to vigorously investigate her killing by a 15-year-old suicide bomber, according to a U.N. fact-finding commission of inquiry.

The three-member U.N. commission, headed by Chilean diplomat Heraldo Muñoz, also accused unnamed high-ranking Pakistani authorities of obstructing the commission's access to military and intelligence sources.

The 65-page report (pdf) -- which relied on interviews with 250 people and several key governments -- provided a blistering account of government lapses that led to one of the most significant political assassination in a generation. In one of its most damning passages, it accused police investigators of deliberately seeking to avoid solving the case out of fear of discovering the possible involvement of Pakistan's intelligence agencies.

"Ms Bhutto's assassination could have been prevented if adequate security measures had been taken," the report stated. It said that none of Pakistan's local or national security authorities "took the necessary to respond to the extraordinary, fresh and urgent security risks that they knew she faced."

The report also harshly critiques Bhutto's political party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), for failing to provide adequate back-up security for the former Pakistani leader. Many of those individuals are now in the government of Bhutto's husband, President Ali Asif Zardari, who was partly involved in overseeing his wife's security.

But the report charges Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik, who was responsible for providing supplemental security on the day of the attack, with fleeing the scene of the explosion, leaving Bhutto's vehicle isolated, a decision that amounted to "a serious security lapse."

"The commission recognizes the heroism of individual PPP supporters, many of whom sacrificed themselves to protect her; however, the additional security arrangements of the PPP lacked leadership and were inadequate and poorly inadequate."

The sharply worded tone of the report appeared to take Pakistani authorities by surprise. Minutes after a copy was presented to the Pakistan's U.N. ambassador Abdullah Haroon, he cancelled a scheduled press conference and announced he would be traveling back to Pakistan to hand-deliver the information to his government.

The Dec. 27, 2007, attack took place as Bhutto was leaving a campaign rally in a neighborhood in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. She died after the force of the explosive forced her head into the handle of an escape hatch of a campaign vehicle. Twenty-four other people were killed in the attack and another 91 were injured.

The commission found that local police "inflicted irreparable damage to the investigation" by hosing down the crime scene hours after Bhutto's assassination and failing to collect evidence. It also challenged the Pakistani government's assertion, made in a press conference shortly after Bhutto's assassination, that a Taliban militant, Baitullah Mehsud, was the mastermind behind the killing. It said that telephone intercepts provided by the Intelligence-Services Intelligence, the powerful Pakistani spy agency, were too ambiguous to prove Mehsud's role in the attack.

The U.N. commission said that the police investigators focused primarily on low-level operatives and ignored potential suspects "further up the hierarchy in the planning, financing and execution of the assassination." It also said the investigation was "severely hampered" by Pakistan's intelligence agencies, which conducted a parallel investigation and selectively shared information with the police.

"The commission believes that the failure of the police to investigate effectively Ms. Bhutto' assassination was deliberate," the commission concluded. And it called on the Pakistan "to carry out a serious, credible, criminal investigation that determines who conceived, ordered and executed this heinous crime of historic proportions, and brings those responsible to justice."
 

ajtr

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Who killed BB?



Saturday, April 17, 2010
Anjum Niaz

The UN report has woefully failed to answer 'Whodunit'. The 65-page narrative is a replay of events that we already know by heart. Ask an 11-year-old who is responsible for Benazir Bhutto's death and he'll say "Musharraf government." Elementary, my dear Watson, as the detective Sherlock Holmes would say to his assistant, when explaining deductions he had made.

But the UN is not a detective agency that hires sleuths to nail the killer/killers? The UN hires ambassadors in three-piece suits, dandy ties and designer shoes who would never deign to dirty their nails digging through piles and piles of soiled paper to reach the pit where truth hides. (One is told the Chilean ambassador leading the BB investigation is an archetypal diplomat narcissistically keen on photo-ops.)

And it was for this exact reason that our two ace Foreign Office men advised Zardari against rushing to the UN Security Council requesting help. The then foreign secretary and our permanent representative in the UN at New York didn't want the UN Security Council to constitute a commission bracketing Pakistan with countries like Rwanda, Lebanon and former Yugoslavia where the UN had set up commissions. "Nothing ever comes out, except being in the spotlight all the time", the two men had warned.

Their notes of dissension cost them their jobs. An angry Zardari lashed out during an interview with a private TV channel "Munir Akram [our UN man in New York] and all these people [our foreign secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan] are inflexible, lack thinking and if Pakistani bureaucracy and establishment had a vision, Pakistan would not be in the state as it is today."

While Zardari spared Pakistan's humiliation by not classifying us with the likes of Rwanda, Sudan and Afghanistan, he instead commissioned (at a hefty taxpayers' cost) the UN to investigate.

During my background interviews with knowledgeable sources here and in the US, I came away convinced that there exists a pool of people who if asked can provide tangible leads to the murder. "How do you expect foreigners to piece the puzzle just in a few months when they know nothing about our mysteries, intricacies and secrets that are arcane and esoteric?"

While unravelling the inscrutable script provided by intelligence agencies and the police of that time, we have a set of brains [if only someone would care to look] whose job and career have been to connect the dots and come to a conclusion. I mean our Foreign Office.

It mans 'desks' and 'divisions' devoted to different regions/countries of the world with a handle on a country's geography, history, politics, economy, international relations and current affairs. Why not brainstorm them? Listen, we have to move beyond Al Qaeda and Baitullah Mehsud [who by the way said he did not believe in killing women when Musharraf calmly passed the blame on him echoed by the then CIA head and President George W Bush within 24 hours of BB's assassination.]

How did the three men know?

"The first rule of thumb when investigating murder is: who stands to benefit most?" a source asked a panel. The question got many answers. Good. We should take all of them and rip them apart. Maybe we'll see the image of the murderer. At the risk of repeating myself, I wrote in this same space only two weeks ago about the editor of a Washington daily receiving a phone call three days before BB's arrival in Karachi not to accompany her as he would get killed. I also mentioned the book by our crime reporter Shakeel Anjum titled Who assassinated Benazir Bhutto. There were some other leads mentioning Condi Rice, Zalmay Khalilzad and the Saudi and UAE intelligence chiefs.

Well today's headline in Inner City Press says it all: 'Condi Rice and Saudi spy chief refused to talk with UN Bhutto panel. No Khalilzad Either.' The New York-based investigative reporter, Matthew Russell Lee, pounded Chile's UN ambassador with questions about the three crucial witnesses. In the end Munoz admitted he was denied interviews by all three. "The findings could [also] have implications for the"¦ Pakistan's military," adds Jonathan S Landay of McClatchy Newspapers.
 

ajtr

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Murder by neglect



Saturday, April 17, 2010
They did not pull the trigger or detonate the bomb that killed Benazir Bhutto, but between-the-lines reading of the UN report into her murder makes it clear that they may well have left the door ajar for those that did. She was killed on the watch of President Musharraf whose government did little to protect a woman it perceived as a threat to its power and primacy. It is a testament to its enduring power that the present government is no more eager to get to the bottom of who killed her than its predecessor, and for all the bombast and bluster President Zardari has never been about to put the murderers of Benazir Bhutto in the dock or authorise any investigation that might expose the deeper truths behind the killing. In paragraph after paragraph the report refers to the lack of cooperation that the investigative team experienced at the hands of establishment figures, men who worked for the security services and the various police forces that were questioned. Time after time their oral evidence conflicted with that of video footage or still camera images. The half-truths and untruths that they told exposed each other's duplicity and the report reads as a catalogue of the dishonesty and ineptitude of public officers at just about every level. There is an inescapable impression of purposeful and directed obstruction, which will raise questions in the minds of a suspicious and doubting public already inured to being lied to by successive governments. Of particular note is the failure of the then government to accord Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister, the same security as was extended to two other former prime ministers on Oct 22, 2007, men who were Musharraf's political allies.

Also of note is the role of Saud Aziz, chief of police in Rawalpindi, whose decisions denied evidence to investigators. He it was who had the assassination site hosed down less than two hours after the attack, he it was who hosted long lunches for investigators the better to divert them from their duties and he it was who was the primary impediment to any autopsy being conducted. Post-assassination inquiries are exposed as worthless – the much-mentioned Scotland Yard inquiry is spoken of in paragraph 195 as being 'abused' by officers of the Rawalpindi District Police, with 'abused' in this context meaning 'lied to'. Is this the incompetence that is a feature of our security apparatus or is there something more behind the actions that have led to a kind of paralysis in finding out more about the most significant political killing of our time? Television networks, including Geo, have produced some very revealing investigative programmes on the assassination and it is a pity more effort has not been made to explore the leads offered up by them.

We have learned little that we did not already know from the report of the UN commission on the murder of Benazir Bhutto and there appears to be nothing in it to warrant delaying its publication by a fortnight. And the tendency here will be to 'fill in the blanks'. The failure of the Musharraf government and now this government to properly investigate it does nothing to debunk the conspiracies, and the UN report may be the unwitting midwife to obfuscation rather than clarity. There are questions here not brought up by the UN – a body known after all for its sometimes crippling diplomacy and bureaucracy. Why, we must ask, has an administration led by Benazir Bhutto's husband done so little to find out who killed his wife? An inquiry at home should have taken place alongside the UN inquiry. It is something of a mystery why this did not happen. There are quite evidently many angles to the assassination that have not been explored. The UN probe points, albeit subtly, to some of these. There is clearly a great deal still hidden from the public eye. Benazir's killing affected an entire nation and that nation deserves to know more about it.
 

M.Riaz

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UN report pack of lies

Islamabad—A UN report on the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is a ''pack of lies'' that wrongly implicates ex-President Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan's security forces for not stopping her killing, Major General (Retd) Rashid Qureshi an aide to Musharraf said Friday.

The three-member UN panel said her death could have been avoided if Musharraf's government and various security agencies had taken adequate measures. It also found that the probe into her death was deliberately hampered by intelligence agencies and other officials.

But Rashid Qureshi insisted that the UN report was based on rumours and that Musharraf was in no way responsible.

''This chief UN investigator was not the relative of Sherlock Homes,'' Qureshi said, noting that Musharraf himself had been the target of suicide attackers.

"The head of the country's most powerful spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence had warned Bhutto not to attend the rally because of looming threats of an attack", Qureshi said.

''But Benazir Bhutto and her chief security officer Rehman Malik decided to go ahead with their planned election rally,'' Qureshi said. ''It was Benazir Bhutto who exposed herself to the attacker.''

Meanwhile, according to APP UN report said the former military regime of Pakistan failed to protect Mohtarma Shaheed Benazir Bhutto despite its knowledge of the numerous threats she faced.

"Ms. Bhutto's assassination could have been prevented if adequate security measures had been taken," asserted an independent commission of inquiry headed by Heraldo Munoz, Chile's U.N. Ambassador, who unveiled the report at a press conference on Thursday evening.

The 65-page report was an indictment of the former dictatorship of General (Retired) Pervez Musharraf, the intelligence services, the Punjab police and the district police of Rawalpindi, where a suicide bomber killed Bhutto on Dec. 27, 2007. "The commission believes that the failure of the police to investigate effectively Ms Bhutto's assassination was deliberate," the report continued. "The officials, in part fearing intelligence agencies' involvement, were unsure of how vigorously they ought to pursue actions, which they knew as professionals, they should have taken," the report said.

"The investigation was severely hampered by intelligence agencies and other government officials, which impeded an unfettered search for the truth," the report said.

"More significantly, the Inter-Services Intelligence conducted parallel investigations, gathering evidence and detaining suspects. Evidence gathered from such parallel investigations was selectively shared with police."

At the outset, the commission chairman thanked the Pakistan government for the "significant support" it received in carrying out its "challenging task".

He pointed out that the mandate of the commission was to determine facts and circumstances of the assassination of the former premier.

"The duty of carrying out a criminal investigation, finding perpetrators and bringing them to justice, remains with the competent Pakistani authorities."

Later, in an interview with Pakistani journalists, Ambassador Munoz said he hoped that the Pakistan government would carry out a thorough investigation into the assassination of the popular leader, and that the UN commission's findings would contribute towards that effort.

The report said, "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.

None of these entities took necessary measures to respond to the extraordinary, fresh and urgent security risks that they knew she faced.

"The federal Government under General Musharraf, although fully aware of, and tracking, the serious threats to Ms Bhutto's security, did little more than pass on those threats to her and provincial authorities and were not proactive in neutralizing them or ensuring that the security provided was commensurate to the threats. "The federal Government failed in its primary responsibility to provide effective protection to Ms Bhutto on her return to Pakistan."

"The federal Government lacked a comprehensive security plan for Ms Bhutto, relying instead on provincial authorities, but then failed to issue to them the necessary instructions. Particularly inexcusable was the Government's failure to direct provincial authorities to provide Ms Bhutto the same stringent and specific security measures it ordered on 22 October 2007 for two other former prime ministers who belonged to the main political party supporting General Musharraf.

This discriminatory treatment is profoundly troubling given the devastating attempt on her life only three days earlier and the specific threats against her which were being tracked by the ISI.

"The three-member commission, which undertook several visits to Pakistan and interviewed a number of people, found that the "Federal Government lacked a comprehensive security plan for Ms Bhutto, relying instead on provincial authorities, but then failed to issue to them the necessary instructions."

"Particularly inexcusable was the Government's failure to direct provincial authorities to provide Ms Bhutto the same stringent and specific security measures it ordered on 22 October 2007 for two other former prime ministers who belonged to the main political party supporting General Musharraf."

The Commission is persuaded that the Rawalpindi police chief, CPO Saud Aziz, did not act independently of higher authorities, either in the decision to hose down the crime scene or to impede the post-mortem examination.

It also found that the Government's press conference conducted by Brigadier Cheema on 28 December 2007, the day after the assassination, was ordered by General Musharraf.

"The Government's assertion that Ms Bhutto's death was caused when she hit her head on the lever of her vehicle's escape hatch and that Baitullah Mehsud and Al-Qaeda were responsible for the suicide bomber were made well before any proper investigation had been initiated. This action preempted, prejudiced and hindered the subsequent investigation.

"An unequivocal determination as to the cause and means of Ms Bhutto's death would have required an autopsy. The Commission has uncovered no new evidence to suggest a gunshot injury to Ms Bhutto. Instead, a senior PPP official who publicly purported soon after the assassination to have seen indications of a bullet injury admitted to the Commission that she did not have direct knowledge of such an injury, the report said.

The report also said that additional security arrangements of the PPP at that time lacked leadership were inadequate and poorly executed.

"The Commission recognizes the heroism of individual PPP supporters, many of whom sacrificed themselves to protect Ms Bhutto. However, Ms Bhutto was left vulnerable in a severely damaged vehicle that was unable to transport her to the hospital by the irresponsible and hasty departure of the bullet-proof Mercedes-Benz which, as the back-up vehicle, was an essential part of her convoy.' But Munoz told reporters that PPP was there to complement the security measure and that they were not professionl expected to do a better job.

pak observer
 

gogbot

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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
i have noticed that your posts either do not have links , or have links to blogs.
 

M.Riaz

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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
i have noticed that your posts either do not have links , or have links to blogs.
i did not have permission to post links i asked the moderator... many of the posts are by famous columnists this last one is from pak observer the few other are by ex military and think tanks - their analysis does hold some value even if its a blog
 

gogbot

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i did not have permission to post links i asked the moderator... many of the posts are by famous columnists this last one is from pak observer the few other are by ex military and think tanks - their analysis does hold some value even if its a blog
If it held any value it would have been picked up by the press.

These blog posts have no fact checking , what is written can be absolute lies, opinion pieces and pure speculation.
 

M.Riaz

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If it held any value it would have been picked up by the press.

These blog posts have no fact checking , what is written can be absolute lies, opinion pieces and pure speculation.
http://pakobserver.net/
thats the place where the last article came from its not a blog its a daily news paper quoting ex chief about the UN reports
 

sob

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Clear indictment of the establishment in Pakistan and ISI/Army in particular for supporting and nurturing LeT.

UN report on Friday said that the Pakistan's powerful military-backed spy agency ISI continues to have close links with Lashkar-e-Toiba and has used the terror group to foment anti-India passion in Kashmir and elsewhere.

"The Pakistani military organised and supported the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan in 1996. Similar tactics were used in Kashmir against India after 1989," said the report by UN-appointed independent panel to probe the killing of former Pakistan Premier Benazir Bhutto.


The three-member panel concluded that such a policy of the Pakistan military to use terrorists as a tool to achieve its strategic objectives against its neighbours resulted in active linkages between elements of the military and the "establishment" with radical Islamists at the expense of national secular forces.

Noting that the jihadi organisations are Sunni groups based largely in Pakistan's Punjab,the65-page report said that members of these groups aided the Taliban effort in Afghanistan at the behest of the ISI.

"The Pakistani military and ISI also used and supported some of these groups in the Kashmir insurgency after 1989. The bulk of the anti-Indian activity was and still re mains the work of groups such as Lashkar-e-Toiba, which has close ties with the ISI," said the panel headed by Chile's UN ambassador Heraldo Munoz.

"A common characteristic of these jihadi groups was their adherence to the Deobandi Sunni sect of Islam, their strong anti-Shia bias, and their use by the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies in Afghanistan and Kashmir," the re- port said. It said that while several Pakistani current and former intelligence officials told the Commission that their agencies no longer had such ties in 2007, but virtually all in- dependent analysts affirmed the on- going nature of many such links.

The report said Qari Saifullah Akhtar, one of the founders of the extremist Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami (HuJI), was reportedly one of the ISI's main links to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and is believed to had cultivated ties to Osama bin Laden.

"Akhtar's one-time deputy Ilyas Kashmiri, who had ties with the Pakistani military during the Afghan and Kashmir campaigns, had been a senior aide to bin Laden's deputy Ayman al Za- wahiri," the report said.

"It was such links and connections between elements in the intelligence agencies and militants, which most concerned Bhutto and many others who believed that the authorities could activate these connections to harm her," it added.
The link is here.

http://epaper.indianexpress.com/IE/IEH/2010/04/17/ArticleHtmls/17_04_2010_010_039.shtml?Mode=1
 

sob

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http://pakobserver.net/
thats the place where the last article came from its not a blog its a daily news paper quoting ex chief about the UN reports
This whole article is only a rebuttal from one of Musharraf's aides who has come under fire in this report. One would expect only this reply from the Brigadier.
 

nitesh

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lets' put the UN report sorry for not putting every page number:

http://www.un.org/News/dh/infocus/Pakistan/UN_Bhutto_Report_15April2010.pdf

some important points...
from page 47

"The Pakistani military organised and supported the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan in 1996. Similar tactics were used in Kashmir against India after 1989. These policies resulted in active linkages between elements of the military and the Establishment with radical Islamists, at the expense of national secular forces . . .


Therefore, a discussion of the threats to Ms Bhutto and of the forces that felt threatened by her potential return to power in Pakistan must include the following: Al-Qaida, Taliban and local jihadi groups and elements of the Establishment."

page 49
. . . "The Pakistani military and ISI also used and supported some of these groups in the Kashmir insurgency after 1989. The bulk of the anti-Indian activity was and still remains the work of groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has close ties with the ISI,"

. . . "A common characteristic of these jihadi groups was their adherence to the Deobandi Sunni sect of Islam, their strong anti-Shia bias, and their use by the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies in Afghanistan and Kashmir," . . .

"It was such links and connections between elements in the intelligence agencies and militants, which most concerned Bhutto and many others who believed that the authorities could activate these connections to harm her. Given their clandestine nature, any such connection in an attack on her is very difficult to detect or prove,"

"the ISI cultivated these relationships, initially in the context of the Cold War and the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980's and later in support of Kashmiri insurgents. While several Pakistani current and former intelligence officials told the Commission that their agencies no longer had such ties in 2007, virtually all independent analysts provided information to the contrary and affirmed the ongoing nature of many such links."
 

nitesh

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''This chief UN investigator was not the relative of Sherlock Homes,'' Qureshi said, noting that Musharraf himself had been the target of suicide attackers.
I stopped reading after this this explains the intellectual level of the person giving statement
 

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