By Declan Walsh, New York Times
Gunmen on Friday May 3 killed a Pakistani prosecutor who had been investigating the murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the 2008 Mumbai attacks. 
By Declan Walsh, New York Times
Gunmen on Friday May 3 killed a Pakistani prosecutor who had been investigating the murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
We believe that anyone who promotes the conspiracy theory that Tehreek-e-Taliban or Baitullah Mehsud (yes they are terrorists and enemies of the people) bombed Benazir Bhutto’s welcome procession in Karachi on October 18, 2007 is either naive or an accessory in the cover-up of her murder. The following piece by Amir Mir is a must read. Read more »
Dear Mr. President
Today is the third death anniversary of Benazir Bhutto. You have completed over two years in the office and yet there is no sign that the people would ever find out who killed your wife, the mother of Bakhtawar, Bilawal, and Asifa, and the country’s most popular political leader who twice served as prime minister. Don’t blame the media if you don’t bring her killers to justice. Read more »
UPDATE: JAN. 11, 2011
BBC NEWS: A freed al-Qaeda suspect who has been linked to attacks on the late Benazir Bhutto is not a terrorist, Punjab’s top judicial official has said. Qari Saifullah Akhtar was released in December after reportedly being placed
under house arrest four months earlier. Punjab Home Minister Rana Sanaullah told reporters in Lahore that Mr Akhtar had been quizzed about two attacks on the former prime minister. But Punjab authorities released him for lack of evidence, said the minister. It is not clear which agency detained Mr Akhtar in August last year, or why. He has previously been detained a number of times and released
The following was originally published on February 17, 2008
By Yousuf Nazar
What happened after he was let go in May 2007 remains a mystery. What is known that instead of trying to prosecute and convict him, the government chose to keep him in ‘custody’ after his arrest in August 2004. It first denied before the Supreme Court on May 5, 2007 that he was in its custody and then quietly released him and informed the Supreme Court on May 26, 2007 that he had been released.
Is Qari Saifullah Akhtar a jihadi? Is he a militant? Is he a rogue double agent who turned his back on the ISI? If so, why no attempt to try him and get a conviction from the court? OR is he an ‘intelligence asset’, a handy tool to be manipulated and dumped at an appropriate time?
I was quite surprised to see this rubbish written by a DAWN staffer (Cyril Almeida). It is a weak and poorly argued piece to suggest (believe it or not) that some militant group could be ”responsible” for BB’s murder.
A quote from this article:
“But the theory gets little play because it’s based on something few Pakistanis know much, or anything, about: militancy. Everyone, though, knows about Musharraf. And about Zardari and his buddies, of course.”
Pakistanis know much more about militancy than some of these desk journalists and writers. Students in the college and university campuses, ordinary workers and peasants from Sohrab Goth to Binori Town, and from Jhang to Bahawalnagar, and from Azad Kashmir to Mir Ali, know so much about militancy that some of these armchair analysts would be shocked. My driver who worked for me four years ago (he was from Swat) could pinpoint the mosques in Karachi where arms were stored and even give the description of the security personnel protecting the militants in addition to tracing their linkages to particular religious outfits. Read more »
From The News
Sunday, May 02, 2010
Gibran Peshimam
The past week ought to be celebrated – and enthusiastically so – in Pakistan. Not just by the common man, but also by political and armed forces. After all, we apparently stand on the threshold of solving many mysteries – ones that we thought we would never get to the bottom of. Read more »
The Sunday Times
By Christina Lamb
Benazir Bhutto was brought back to Pakistan from exile as part of an international deal. Then she was killed — and all traces of evidence were immediately swept away. Our award-winning correspondent follows the clues to her killers in London, Karachi and Washington Read more »
It is time to reform the Army and the intelligence services
The UN report has some highly disturbing and incriminating pieces. Most importantly, they make it abundantly clear that it wasn’t just one individual or a few individuals who were part of what now appears to be a grand cover-up. The report incriminates not just Musharraf but the top guns of the ISI, MI, and the IB as well as the police and the interior ministry. For those who have always maintained that Army is a well disciplined and organised institution, it has become increasingly difficult to make the self-contradictory assertion that the series of acts, commissions and omissions, were just the acts of few individual officers. Read more »
Benazir non-investigation: the cover-up continues even after the UN report
One fact that the UN investigators did not know or could not get to is what was Rehman Malik doing around the mid night of the evening Benazir was assassinated. The mystery has deepened after an eyewitness has revealed that Rehman Malik was seen in the Regent’s Hotel Karachi (at Shahra-e-Faisal) around mid-night. While there is no doubt about that, it is speculated that he had brought Khalid Shahenshah with him. Would Rehman Malik explain his conduct and whereabouts on the 27th and 28th of December? Read more »
Published in The Express Tribune
By Zafar Hilaly
Karachi: The UN report on Benazir Bhutto’s assassination does nothing for some but a lot for others. Read more »
The biggest conspiracy theory that I have come across in the recent years is that Benazir Bhutto fell victim to a terrorist attack. Ninety percent of our media analysts have been, deliberately or unconsciously, part of the larger conspiracy to lay the blame for most violence in Pakistan on terrorism and extremism or on the mullahs but do not have the guts to point to the root causes, the principal accused and the main culprit …. the military establishment. Read more »
Not only did Pakistani authorities fail to provide former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto the security that could have saved her life, but elements 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. Read more »
The following is the executive summary of the report: Click here for the full report
Executive Summary Read more »
It will be late night or early morning in Pakistan when the much awaited United Nations report on Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is released by the UN. There is a litmus test that will determine, for me at least, whether the report has any relevance or meaning. I will come to that later in this article. The United Nations commission was charged with examining the facts and circumstances behind the December 2007 assassination. The Commission is headed by Ambassador Heraldo Muñoz of Chile, and its other members are Marzuki Darusman, the former attorney-general of Indonesia, and Peter Fitzgerald, a veteran of the Irish National Police who has also served the UN in various roles. The UN fact-finders were asked to probe Ms. Bhutto’s assassination in a gun and bomb suicide attack in the closing days of Pakistan’s 2007 elections, as well as her narrow escape from a similar bombing two months earlier, when she paraded triumphantly through Karachi after returning home from eight years in exile. Read more »
From Inter-City Press By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, April 15 — In investigating the murder of Benazir Bhutto, the UN Commission of Inquiry lead by Chile’s Heraldo Munoz was urged to interview Condoleezza Rice, Hamid Karzai and the intelligence chiefs of the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Read more »
ISLAMABAD: Investigations into murder of Benazir Bhutto take a new turn as Pakistani officials said they are searching for four military personnel who had disappeared just before the assassination of the former prime minister.
Interior ministry officials told DawnNews that the missing soldiers were retired army personnel who were among the eight army soldiers related to the main accused and a proclaimed offender in the case, Ibad Ur Rehman.
The interior ministry officials disclosed that investigators are facing difficulties in determining the exact status of these soldiers and so far no record had been provided. The four other soldiers are still serving the army.
These four army personnel had never been mentioned in the legal proceedings before an anti-terrorist court in Rawalpindi.
This is the first time that the investigators are probing into the possibility of army soldiers’ involvement into the assassination of the former prime minister.
A UN commission constituted to probe into the assassination of Ms. Bhutto is expected to submit its report by the end of this month.
When DawnNews tried to ascertain the view of military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas on this revelation, he could not be reached on his telephone despite repeated attempts.