Bhutto's party to seek U.N. probe if wins power

KARACHI: The party of slain Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto will call on the United Nations for an inquiry into her assassination if it forms a government after elections next month, a party spokesman said on Sunday.   

The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) has aired deep suspicions over the motives and identities of Bhutto's assassins, who launched a gun-and-bomb attack against her at the end of a campaign rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi on Dec. 27.   

"If the PPP comes to power, we will ask the U.N. to hold an inquiry," said Farhatullah Babar, a senior official in Bhutto's party, who accuses the government of screening the real culprits.   

"The government's position on the assassination has been shifting from day to day," he added.    The government has blamed al Qaeda and initially said Bhutto was killed when the suicide-bomb blast threw her head against the sun-roof lever of the car in which she was standing, despite TV footage showing a gunman firing at her head a split second before.   

The official version, which also contradicted eyewitness reports of gunshot wounds, has stoked suspicions among Pakistanis that government or military elements opposed to the country's transition to civilian-led democracy were behind the attack.   

On Saturday, CBS News quoted President Pervez Musharraf as conceding that a gunman might have shot Bhutto after all. Musharraf announced last week that Britain's Scotland Yard would help Pakistan with the probe into Bhutto's death, but this fell short of the PPP's demand for a U.N. inquiry such as the one into the 2005 killing of former Lebanese premier Rafik al-Hariri.   

"The Scotland Yard team, if it contacts the PPP, we will extend its cooperation but we believe that the Scotland Yard investigation has already been circumscribed," Babar said. He said Bhutto had named several people she suspected were out to kill her in a letter sent to Musharraf last month, but Babar said it was clear that those named would not be probed.   

"If the Scotland Yard team cannot investigate the people named in Mrs Bhutto's letter ... what use is an inquiry?" he said. Bhutto's body was buried the day after her killing, in keeping with Muslim custom, without a post-mortem.   

Her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, now the party's de facto leader, declined to comment on Sunday. He has not said yet whether the family would agree to the exhumation of Bhutto's body without the formation of a full U.N. inquiry.   

"I don't want to respond to anything at the moment," he said by phone from Dubai. In an opinion article in Saturday's Washington Post, Zardari urged that a new caretaker government be named to oversee national elections that were postponed until Feb. 18.   

Elections were delayed from the original date of Jan. 8 after Bhutto's assassination.