The 65-page report released held the Musharraf regime guilty and did not buy the theory that Taliban’s Baitullah Mehsud had carried out the assassination. It also accused some high-ranking Pakistani authorities of obstructing the commission’s access to military and intelligence sources but did not name them. It said a police investigator deliberately sought to avoid solving the case out of fear of discovering the possible involvement of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
Benazir Bhutto’s assassination on Dec 27, 2007 could have been prevented if the government under then-President Pervez Musharraf, the Punjab state government, and the Rawalpindi District Police had taken adequate measures ‘to respond to the extraordinary, fresh and urgent security risks that they knew she faced’, the report said.
At the time a gun and suicide-bomb took place, the former prime minister of Pakistan was leaving a rally in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, where she was campaigning to return her Pakistan People’s Party to power in parliamentary elections.
While on the local police, the report said local police inflicted irreparable damage to the investigation by failing to collect evidence and by hosing down the crime scene hours after Bhutto’s assassination.. Police investigators focused primarily on low-level operatives and ignored potential suspects ‘further up the hierachary in the planning, financing and execution of the assassination’. It said Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence conducted parallel investigations, gathering evidence that was only selectively shared with the police.
The UN Commission, set up at the express request of Zardari government, has urged Pakistani authorities to carry out a ‘serious, credible’ criminal investigation that determines who conceived, ordered and executed this heinous crime of historic proportions, and brings those responsible to justice. ‘Doing so would constitute a major step toward ending impunity for political crimes in this country’.
