Inquiry into Bhutto killing begins

A UN fact-finding commission began an inquiry yesterday into the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Bhutto was murdered in a suicide gun-and-bomb attack in the city of Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007, after a rally to drum up support for a general election she had hoped to win.

Her murder threw nuclear-armed US ally Pakistan into crisis and her Pakistan People’s Party rode a wave of sympathy to win the election, which was delayed until February 2008.

Her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, later become president.

The three-member UN team is headed by Chile’s UN Ambassador Heraldo Munoz and will take six months for its investigation.

“It’s a fact-finding mission. It has started work today and it’ll just inquire into the facts and circumstances of the assassination,” said the UN spokeswoman, Ishrat Rizvi.

While it started its work yesterday, the team was not yet in Pakistan but would arrive this month, Rizvi said.

The team will not be empowered to launch criminal proceedings related to the assassination.

That will make it much less far-reaching than a UN investigation of the 2005 killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, which is intended to lead to a UN-organised trial in The Hague.