The reports issued by the United Nations (UN) and Joint Investigation Team (JIT), formed by the government of Pakistan to probe Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader Benazir Bhutto’s (BB) murder, blame the Musharraf government for her assassination, Mark Siegel wrote in New York Daily News.
The government has begun criminal proceedings against the seven accused, including Musharraf and requested Interpol to issue an international warrant for the arrest of Musharraf after a four-year investigation.
If and when Interpol issues a red warrant against Musharraf, the police of all 190 Interpol member countries will have the authority to arrest him. He has been summoned before the Supreme Court of Pakistan today, March 22.
A United Nations tribunal issued a blistering 70-page report essentially holding the Musharraf government responsible for Bhutto’s murder. The UN concluded that the failure of the police to effectively investigate Bhutto’s assassination, and the destruction of evidence, was deliberate and ordered from above. The UN also found that the assassination would have been prevented if the authorities had provided adequate security.
Picking up the mantle of the UN report, the government of Pakistan formed a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) to investigate the assassination. The JIT concluded its report last month, and its conclusions are not ambiguous: Musharraf, working with two police officers who reported back to him, knew of the plotting of the assassination, was aware of the timing and personally ordered the destruction of evidence.
Those officers facilitated the terrorists who devised the multifaceted elements of the conspiracy, from conception to execution to coverup. Musharraf’s failure to provide security to Bhutto, despite his full knowledge that an assassination would be attempted, all but ensured that the conspiracy would succeed.
BB was assassinated on Dec. 27, 2007 as she left a campaign event in Rawalpindi. Despite the fact that Musharraf had ordered intense security teams to guard two other former prime ministers who were his political supporters, Bhutto was provided with virtually no security at all.
The crime scene in Rawalpindi was almost immediately washed down, with forensic evidence hosed away by the police. No witnesses were interrogated. No autopsies took place. Nor did an investigation.
Mark Siegel wrote that Musharraf had threatened BB with dire consequences if she returned to Pakistan to lead her Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in the upcoming elections, where she was the major threat to defeat him. Bhutto quoted Musharraf as saying that she would be responsible for what happened to her.
Afterward, she emailed her adviser and friend Mark Siegel to say that if anything happened to her, she would hold Musharraf responsible.
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