Why Scotland Yard is reporting to suspected Mush?

Drama of Scotland yard is exposed, it wants to provide clean slip to Mush.

Scotland Yard quietly delivers Bhutto report

By Laurie Goering | Tribune foreign correspondent

Chicago Tribune

January 9, 2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - For the last several days, anti-terrorism investigators from Scotland Yard have been scouring the scene of Benazir Bhutto's killing, interviewing hospitalized survivors of the attack and poring over morgue records, trying to pin down precisely how she died.

On Tuesday, the team delivered a confidential report of their early findings to embattled President Pervez Musharraf. But whether the information will ever be made public, or will help resolve many unanswered questions and accusations surrounding her death, remains in doubt.

Seeking legitimacy

With the nation awash in angry charges that the government was complicit in the killing, or at least failed to provide adequate security for the former prime minister, Scotland Yard's involvement is widely seen as an attempt by the government to lend its own investigation a veneer of legitimacy.

But the involvement of the British team "will not help because they've been invited by the government," said Gen. Hameed Gul, a former head of Pakistan's intelligence services. "The report will be submitted to the government and it will not be released," he predicted.

Bhutto had just finished a campaign speech in Rawalpindi on Dec. 27 and was preparing to drive away from the rally when she emerged through the sunroof of her armored vehicle to wave at a surrounding mob of supporters. What happened next is a matter of considerable dispute.

Video footage broadcast on television and the Internet shows a man near the car raising a gun in her direction, followed by the explosion of a suicide blast. Bhutto aides in the car and nearby in the crowd say she was shot in the neck and head and died of blood loss after being pulled back inside.

Musharraf's government, however, at first insisted the opposition party leader had died when she hit her head on the car's sunroof lever as she re-entered the vehicle, something those inside the car denied. The president has blamed the explosion on Islamic militants.

In recent days, however, Musharraf has conceded Bhutto might have died of a bullet wound, though he insisted she was to blame because she decided to emerge from the armored car.

He has steadfastly maintained, even before the government's investigation is complete, that no state official was involved in her death.

The investigators' task of proving conclusively what happened -- and more importantly, who was to blame -- will be harder because of the peculiar way in which Pakistani officials have handled the case. Government workers quickly used fire hoses to wash down the scene of the killing, destroying potential forensic evidence.

That, Gul said, is not routinely done "in Pakistan or anywhere else in the world."

Bhutto's body also was not subjected to an autopsy, in part because of her husband's wishes, which has crippled investigators' efforts to determine whether she was fired on by more than one gunman.

The failures in collecting evidence and the government's changing story on the cause of Bhutto's death suggest "either gross inefficiency or deliberate confusion to cover something up," said Talat Masood, a former Pakistani general and defense analyst in Islamabad.

In London, Bhutto's son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, said at a news conference Tuesday that he would be satisfied only with a UN investigation into his mother's killing. "We do not believe that an investigation under the authority of the Pakistani government has the necessary transparency," said Bhutto Zardari, 19, selected to lead his mother's political party after her death.

Scotland Yard investigators, invited to cooperate with the Pakistani government probe of the killing, have been charged only with determining how Bhutto died, not who is responsible.

In recent days they have parked vehicles on the street where she was killed to try to recreate the scene and climbed over surrounding buildings to survey the scene and perhaps explore where other potential gunmen might have been positioned.

They also this week interviewed hospitalized survivors of the suicide bomb blast and examined medical and morgue records, officials said, as well as talking to bystanders at the crime scene.

Not persuaded

Raja Muhammad Yasim, 27, a worker in Bhutto's political party who has been manning a makeshift shrine to her near the scene of her death and watching the investigation, said he was not persuaded Scotland Yard's work would settle the questions surrounding her killing.

"If the government has asked them to work according to [the government's] wish, what can they do?" he said. "I believe the government was involved."

Still, if the complete Scotland Yard report is eventually released and it "says the government is not involved, we will believe it," he said.

After Musharraf met with the British investigators Tuesday, Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema vowed that their findings would be released to the public and that Musharraf assured them "they were totally free to conduct their probe, and no one will interfere in their affairs."

Last week, Musharraf had said the British investigators would not be allowed to conduct a "wild goose chase."

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