2010/04/16
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan will respond after studying a report by a UN-appointed panel which said the assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto could have been averted.
“We are reading the report and a detailed reaction would be given after it,” presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar told AFP today.
The independent panel Thursday said that the 2007 murder of Bhutto was avoidable and that the authorities deliberately failed to properly investigate her death.
State television quoted Babar as saying that government was investigating her assassination.
“The government is not oblivious to its duties and it is investigating the murder of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto,” Babar was quoted as saying.
“According to the (UN) report federal and provincial governments failed to provide security to her.”
The UN report, which was requested by President Asif Ali Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party government, was turned over to UN chief Ban Ki-moon yesterday.
Zardari, Bhutto’s widower, took over the party leadership after her assassination and was elected president of the country in September 2008.
Pakistan said last week it had asked that the release, initially scheduled for March 30, be delayed so that input from Afghanistan, the United States and Saudi Arabia could be included.
Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik said he had asked the UN-appointed, three-member panel to include input from former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Saudi Arabia.
He did not detail what information he wanted to be included.
Bhutto, the first woman to become prime minister of a Muslim country, was killed on December 27, 2007 in a gun and suicide attack after addressing an election rally in Rawalpindi, a garrison city near the capital Islamabad. -- AFP
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