U.N. Report Finds Faults in Pakistani Bhutto Inquiry

New York Times

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A United Nations investigation into the assassination of the former opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has concluded that the failure of Pakistani authorities to effectively investigate the killing was “deliberate” and had been “severely hampered” by the country’s powerful intelligence agencies.
The 65-page report, issued in New York on Thursday, did not answer the question of who killed Ms. Bhutto, or even give the precise cause of death. It was concerned instead with looking into the facts and circumstances surrounding her death in a suicide bombing and gun attack at a political rally in December 2007.
Its findings underscore the impunity with which political crimes are committed in Pakistan, a country whose short and turbulent history is punctuated by unexplained killings of prominent leaders.
The response in Pakistan to the UN report was muted on Friday, with television commentators sticking mostly to general points about security lapses, instead of delving into the most pointed criticism of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agencies.
Presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar said that Pakistan’s government had already opened an investigation into Ms. Bhutto’s death last year, but that the UN report would be “a shot in the arm,” for that probe. The report cataloged a litany of failings on the part of the authorities before and after the attack that killed Ms. Bhutto, leaving an impression of purposeful obstruction and raising questions of whether the country’s military and intelligence establishment had something to hide.
It was particularly scathing of the role of Saud Aziz, the police chief in Rawalpindi, the city where the assassination took place, who made a series of decisions that denied investigators valuable evidence.These included orders to hose down the crime scene less than two hours after the attack. Hosting long lunches and serving tea, he then delayed investigators for two full days from reaching the site, where they finally spent seven hours wading through a drainage sewer to retrieve a single bullet casing.Investigators managed to collect just 23 pieces of evidence in a case that would typically have yielded thousands, the report said.The decision to hose down the site was made after Mr. Aziz received a call from army headquarters, possibly involving Maj. Gen. Nadeem Ijaz Ahmad, then director general of military intelligence, the report said, citing anonymous sources. It called a later Pakistani inquiry into the decision “a whitewash.”“Hosing down the crime scene so soon after the blast goes beyond mere incompetence,” the report said. “It is up to the relevant authorities to determine whether this amounts to criminal responsibility.”The report also criticized Mr. Aziz for deliberately preventing an autopsy, repeatedly denying doctors permission to conduct it, and effectively eliminating another central piece of evidence.It says he then tried to “cover up” his failure by putting Ms. Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, in the position of requesting one as he was presented with his wife’s body in a coffin on an air base outside Rawalpindi, a full seven hours after her death. A request then, the report says, would have been “patently unrealistic.”The report in large part dismisses allegations that Mr. Zardari, who is now president, had any hand in Ms. Bhutto’s death.
Conspiracy theories involving Mr. Zardari “simply had no basis, no evidence to be treated as credible hypotheses,” said Heraldo Muñoz Valenzuela, a Chilean diplomat who was part of the three-member team that conducted the investigation. He spoke at a news conference at the United Nations that was broadcast live on the Internet.Instead, the report criticized what it called the pervasive influence of the country’s military and intelligence authorities. The country’s main intelligence agency, know by its initials, the I.S.I., conducted its own parallel investigation even though it does not have a legal mandate to conduct criminal investigations, and selectively withheld information from the police, it said.“The investigation was severely hampered by intelligence agencies and other government officials,” the reports said, “which impeded an unfettered search for the truth.”
Agents from the I.S.I. were present at crucial points of the police investigation, including during the gathering of evidence at the crime scene and the forensic examination of Ms. Bhutto’s vehicle, “playing a role that the police were reluctant to reveal to the commission,” the report said, referring to the United Nations panel.
An I.S.I. officer was also present at the hospital throughout the evening.
The relationship with the military was a fraught one for Ms. Bhutto, who had raised concerns about Pakistanis she believed were a threat to her security to Pervez Musharraf, a military general who was then the president. They included a former I.S.I. director, Hamid Gul, and a former military intelligence officer, Brigadier Ejaz Shah.Particularly disturbing, the report said, was Mr. Musharraf’s failure to provide Ms. Bhutto, a former prime minister, with the same security that was extended to two other former prime ministers on Oct. 22, 2007, who were his political allies.“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 I.S.I.,” the report said.It also noted sharply that it was Mr. Musharraf who made the decision to call a news conference the day after the assassination. In it, the government presented evidence of a telephone intercept collected by the I.S.I. linking the attack to the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud.“It is not clear how or when the intercept from the I.S.I. was recorded,” the report said. “Such a hasty announcement of the perpetrator prejudiced the police investigations which had not yet begun,” it added.
The report made no definitive judgement as to who was behind the plot to kill Ms. Bhutto, nor did it resolve the precise cause of her death, which occurred after a 15-year-old suicide bomber detonated his payload.
But it concluded, “No one believes that this boy acted alone.”