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Scotland Yard’s report on Bhutto assassination
Britain again comes to Musharraf’s aid
By K. Ratnayake and Keith Jones
16 February 2008

A Scotland Yard investigation team has issued a report on the
assassination of two-time Pakistani Prime Minister, Pakistan Peoples
Party (PPP) leader, and PPP prime ministerial candidate Benazir
Bhutto. Although the report is largely politically motivated conjecture—Pakistani
authorities had themselves destroyed much of the evidence within
hours of the assassination—the regime of embattled dictator
Pervez Musharraf and its mentors in the Bush administration have
seized on it as proof of their earlier claims that Bhutto’s
murder was the work of Al Qaeda and/or the Taliban and them alone.

Bhutto was assassinated last December 27 at the conclusion
of an election rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. The Pakistani
government and Washington immediately blamed her death on extremist
Islamic groups—all the while ignoring the longstanding intimate
ties between the military-intelligence apparatus and armed Islamic
groups, Bhutto’s own repeated warnings that elements in and
around the military-controlled government were out to kill her,
and Bhutto’s complaints that the government was not providing
her with proper security.

On the day of her assassination, Bhutto was to meet visiting
US lawmakers to hand over a report on the preparations of a group
led by a retired leader of Pakistan’s secret police, the
ISI, to rig the coming elections.

The widespread popular sentiment that the military or Musharraf’s
political cronies either organised or facilitated Bhutto’s
assassination was further fueled by the actions of the authorities
in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. The crime scene
was quickly hosed down, obliterating important forensic evidence.
Then a government spokesman denied eyewitness reports Bhutto had
been shot and bizarrely suggested that Bhutto had inadvertently
killed herself. He repeatedly said that Bhutto, who had been waving
to her supporters from a car, had died because of injuries she
suffered when she hit her head on a sunroof latch while trying
to retreat into the car after hearing gunfire.

In the days following Bhutto’s death, the country was
convulsed by a mass upheaval, without parallel in recent decades.
Ordinary Pakistanis demonstrated their hatred for the regime by
attacking government property and the offices of the pro-Musharraf
Pakistan Mulsim League (Q) [PML (Q).] The riots were quelled only
after security forces shot and killed almost 60 people and made
mass arrests and after opposition leaders, including Asif Ali
Zardari, Bhutto’s widower and the PPP’s interim leader
pending the passing of the party leadership to their son, appealed
for calm.

Musharraf and Pakistani authorities long vehemently rejected
any and all suggestions that foreign police forces or the UN probe
Bhutto’s assassination. But with the regime desperately isolated
and all but bereft of credibility and legitimacy, Islamabad ultimately
asked the British government to let Scotland Yard assist the investigation.

The conditions under which the Scotland Yard team worked—conditions
agreed to by British Prime Minster Gordon Brown—effectively
ensured it would produce a report that would support, or at least
not significantly challenge, the Pakistani government’s version
of events.

London and Islamabad agreed that the Scotland Yard team would
be allowed only to investigate the cause of Bhutto’s death.
Establishing the identity of her killer, let alone who orchestrated
her murder, was left entirely to the Pakistani police and government.

The Scotland Yard team based its conclusions on only a select
portion of the potential evidence, since the crime scene was hosed
down and some standard medical imaging procedures were inexplicably
not performed. Also, no autopsy was ever carried out, reportedly
because her husband, Zardari, said it was contrary to Islamic
practice.

The executive summary of the Scotland Yard report itself says:
“The task of establishing exactly what happened was complicated
by the lack of an extended and detailed search of the crime scene,
the absence of an autopsy, and the absence of recognised body
recovery and victim identification processes. Nevertheless, the
evidence that is available is sufficient for reliable conclusions
to be drawn.”

The Scotland Yard team looked only at x-rays of Bhutto’s
head, not at pictures of her neck and torso, although eyewitnesses
said that was where she was hit by one or more bullets.

Nevertheless, the British team concluded that the cause of
death was a blow to her head and furthermore that she had not
been shot.

Said the report, “The limited X-ray material, the absence
of a full post mortem examination and CT scan, have meant that
the UK Home Office pathologist, Dr. Nathaniel Cary, who has been
consulted in this case, is unable categorically to exclude the
possibility of there being a gunshot wound to the upper trunk
or neck. However, when his findings are put alongside the accounts
of those who had close contact with Ms. Bhutto’s body, the
available evidence suggests that there was no gunshot injury”

In one significant respect, the Scotland Yard report does differ
with earlier Pakistani government claims. It makes clear that
the blow Bhutto suffered to her head was not self-inflicted. She
struck her head on the car-roof latch because she was propelled
against it by the force of the explosion.

Based on video and still photographs of the killing, the Scotland
Yard team further concluded that there was a lone assassin, who
first shot at Bhutto, then detonated a bomb.

The question of whether Bhutto was shot and whether the gunman
was the same as the suicide bomber-attacker are quite significant,
because, as experts have pointed out, to detonate a bomb and strike
a person with a bullet while being jostled in a crowd require
very different levels of expertise and training.

Not surprisingly, the Pakistani government and its supporters
have embraced the Scotland Yard report. Chaudhary Abdul Majid,
the head of Pakistani police team investigating the attack, was
quick to say he accepts its conclusions. PML (Q) Secretary Mushahid
Hussain Sayedon urged the Western powers to accept the investigation
done by the Scotland Yard team (and eschew the continued appeals
of the PPP for a UN probe).

The Bush administration also backed the Scotland Yard report.
US State Department spokesman Tom Casey said: “In terms of
the investigation itself by Scotland Yard, we view this as a credible
investigation by independent, outside experts.” He added:
“We don’t have any reason why we would question the
validity of their assessment.”

The New York Times, however, was forced to concede that
the claims the Scotland Yard report was conclusive are entirely
unjustified: “In effect, Scotland Yard was left with only
deductions, not proof.” What it did not add was that such
claims are politically motivated, as was the rush of the Bush
administration, supported by the media, to tout the Pakistani
government claims, in the days following Bhutto’s murder,
that she was a victim of Islamic extremism.

The British government—which until 1947 ruled Pakistan
as part of its Indian empire, it should be emphasised—has
been a staunch supporter of the Musharraf regime. It also has
developed a close working relationship with police and security
officials in Pakistan in the name of combating terrorist attacks
in Britain.

During 2007, the Blair-Brown government worked in tandem with
the Bush administration in seeking to bolster the Musharraf regime,
by brokering a power-sharing agreement between Musharraf, who
seized power in a 1999 coup, and Bhutto and her PPP.

The PPP did provide political cover to Musharraf at the time
of last October’s sham presidential election, and little
more than two weeks later, Bhutto returned from exile to Karachi.
But within hours of her arriving back in Pakistan, she was the
target of a bomb attack that killed 140 people. Bhutto blamed
the attack on elements in and around the government, while insisting
that she did not believe Musharraf was himself responsible. Then,
on November 3, Musharraf imposed martial law, so as to pre-empt
a Supreme Court ruling that his “re-election” as president
was unconstitutional, making it still more difficult for Bhutto
to justify a deal with the dictator.

Like the Bush administration, the British government is anxious
to shield Musharraf and most importantly, the military-security
apparatus, which it regards as a pivotal ally in the so-called
“war on terror” and the chief bulwark of the crisis-ridden
Pakistani state, from any further political fallout from the Bhutto
assassination.

Immediately after the report was released, the spokeswoman
for the PPP, Sherri Rehman, who was with Bhutto on the day she
was assassinated and later helped wash her body prior to her funeral,
challenged Scotland Yard’s findings: “We disagree with
the finding on the cause of the death. She died from a bullet
injury. This was and is our position.” The PPP’s legal
head has said a detailed response to the report is being prepared.

A week after the report’s release, criticism is mounting.
An article by Masood Haider in maximnews argues investigators
ignored critical evidence, as well as testimonies of people who
were with Bhutto at the time the attack took place. He says one
such testimony ignored was that of Naheed Khan, a Bhutto confidante
who said the bomb blast took place only after a bleeding Bhutto
had fallen on her lap.

Asma Jehangir, head of the independent Human Rights Commission
of Pakistan, has said, “The Scotland Yard findings do not
satisfy the basic requirements of any investigation.”

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