NYT : Some Killings Don’t Get Solved

Some Killings Don’t Get Solved

By JOHN F. BURNS | February 10, 2008

WHO killed Benazir Bhutto? How was it done? By bullet or bomb, or both? And who sent the killer — Islamic militants with links to Al Qaeda, rogue elements of the Pakistani Army, or political rivals in the election scheduled for Feb. 18?

Six weeks have passed since the assassination, and Pakistan seems no closer to a consensus on some of the most basic facts, making it ever more likely that the circumstances of Ms. Bhutto’s death will become grist for the political mills that grind remorselessly in that country, revitalizing the revenge and mistrust that have poisoned public life almost since the country’s founding in 1947.

So it was with the death of Ms. Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, hanged in 1979 and lauded or condemned as murderer or martyr ever since; so, too, with the death in 1988 of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, who ordered Mr. Bhutto’s execution. His death in a plane crash — blamed variously on Islamic militants, rogue forces in the army, and scheming politicians (including Bhutto loyalists bent on revenge) — remains part of the morbid fabric of Pakistani politics.

On Friday, a Scotland Yard team released its findings after a two-and-a-half-week probe of Ms. Bhutto’s killing in Pakistan. The British experts found that “the only tenable cause” for her death was the severe trauma to her head suffered when a suicide attacker detonated his bomb as she tried to duck back into her armored Land Cruiser, ramming her head against the lip on the escape hatch. From examination of body parts lifted from the scene of the attack, and video and still photographs of the killing, they also concluded that there had been one, not two, assailants; the man who fired the gunshots that caused Ms. Bhutto to duck was, they said, also the bomber.

But the chances that their findings will still the controversy over what happened in the Dec. 27 killing seemed slim. Bhutto family associates lost no time in raising objections; prominent among these, it seemed, was the fact that in one important respect the Scotland Yard experts’ conclusion tallied with that of Pakistan’s government: that Ms. Bhutto had died solely from the bombing, and had not been struck by a bullet. Sherry Rehman, a close friend of Ms. Bhutto’s who was with her when she was killed, told the BBC that relatives and friends of the slain leader found it “difficult to agree” with that conclusion.

The British entered the investigation with several major handicaps, beginning with the grotesque bungling of the assassination’s immediate aftermath by the Pakistan authorities. There was no autopsy and no CT scan, and her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, rejected any suggestion of an exhumation, citing Islamic sensibilities. There was little forensic evidence gathered at the scene, which was washed down within hours of the killing. The main forensic clue lay in X-ray photographs taken at the hospital where Ms. Bhutto was declared dead, showing only her head. In effect, Scotland Yard was left with deductions, not proof.

And the agreement between President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Gordon Brown limited the British team to helping establish the cause of Ms. Bhutto’s death, not the identity of the killer or killers, or who sent them. Those were issues, General Musharraf insisted, for Pakistani investigators. So it seemed sure that any conclusion the British reached would be heavily discounted in advance by Pakistanis who distrust the Musharraf government or seek, as in past political murders, to make political capital out of the killing.

But that was not all. The British carry considerable freight from their times as colonial rulers in the subcontinent, and they are rarely regarded as disinterested parties. In any dealings with Pakistan over police and security matters, their bona fides are bound to be questioned.

What is more, Britain these days has a home-grown problem with Islamic terrorism, much of it rooted in the discontent of young men of Pakistani origin raised in the grimy cities of the English midlands and north, many of them the third generation of families that migrated in the 1950s and 1960s. The transit bombings in London that killed 52 people in July 2005 had links to militant madrasas in Pakistan that have had a powerful appeal to young British-born Pakistanis in search of identity.

So British counterterrorism officials have made close working relations with their Pakistani counterparts a priority.

All of those elements increase the chances that there will never be a resolution of this case in the public mind, but rather just the welter of claim and counterclaim now forming. In one sense, that is not surprising: In the contest within Pakistan’s political elite for power and wealth in a land of 160 million people with a crippling illiteracy rate, political mythology is a powerful tool, especially when it involves the violent death of a populist leader.

But before the Western world passes judgment, many Pakistanis would say, it might well look at its own manipulations, including the role the United States played in placing Ms. Bhutto on the path that led to that last rally in Rawalpindi.

For months, Washington had brokered contacts between General Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto that aimed at having her return, win an election, and lend a democratic facade to a government that would remain, in important ways, under military control. The plan matched American imperatives in the struggle against Al Qaeda, and American officials who pushed for it saw little problem in encouraging General Musharraf to grant an amnesty for Ms. Bhutto against corruption charges stemming from her time as prime minister.

But the Americans knew that she went home at enormous risk. When she spoke in Aspen at a lunch of prominent American political, business and media leaders only weeks before her death, talk at one table turned to the chances of an assassination. “I’d say she’s a dead woman walking,” this reporter, long an acquaintance of Ms. Bhutto, said after talking to her about the hazards of going home. “Yes,” a powerful Washington insider with close links to the administration replied. “We think so, too.”