Word: musharraf
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...within the powerful military establishment may even have played a role in her December 2007 assassination. Those are some of the chilling conclusions of a U.N. inquiry, published Friday, April 16, into the killing that rocked Pakistan in the final months in power of former military ruler President Pervez Musharraf...
...report's claims against the Musharraf government have been denounced by Musharraf's spokesman as a "pack of lies." After twin suicide bombers attacked Bhutto's homecoming procession in October 2007, killing 149 people, the threats to her life were plain to see. But according to the report, the Musharraf government, though "fully aware and tracking" such threats, did little more than pass them on "to her and to provincial authorities, and were not proactive in neutralizing them." The Musharraf government also failed to provide Bhutto the security it granted two other former Prime Ministers from Musharraf's party...
...commission was also highly critical of the "pervasive role" played by Pakistan's leading spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), then headed by Lieut. General Nadeem Taj, a key Musharraf ally and relative. While the ISI had no mandate to conduct criminal investigations, the report says its agents maintained a constant presence around the police probe. And the lack of a mandate didn't stop it from pursuing its own private investigation, the results of which were only sparingly and selectively shared with the police. There were also "credible assertions of politicized and clandestine action by the intelligence services" concerning...
...after Bhutto was killed, Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema, a senior official at the Interior Ministry, held a press conference, on Musharraf's instructions, to pin the assassination on Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed last August in a rocket strike in South Waziristan - a claim later supported by the CIA. According to the report, it was no secret that Pakistan's militants loathed Bhutto and her stance against Islamist violence. But the Musharraf government's "hasty" announcement, the report says, "was premature at best" and "prejudiced the police investigations which had not yet begun...
...Despite the questions raised by the U.N. probe, investigation of possible military involvement in Bhutto's assassination will prove extremely difficult. Musharraf now languishes in self-imposed exile in London, beyond the reach of Pakistani authorities. And the army he left behind, whose political clout is undiminished, is unlikely to accept a potentially humiliating probe into one of its longest-serving commanders in chief. "No credible criminal investigation can proceed in Pakistan," says Farzana Shaikh, a senior Pakistan analyst at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs, "because that would mean going to the heart of the military...