UN Bhutto Inquiry: Assassination was Preventable

The U.N. Commission of Inquiry charged with investigating the December 2007 assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto says her murder could have been prevented if adequate security measures had been taken. The 65-page report released Thursday faults the Pakistani government and local authories, as well as the police, for not taking the necessary measures to protect her. The commission also criticized the subsequent police investigation.

The highly-anticipated report says the ultimate responsibility for Ms. Bhutto's security on the day she was killed rested with the federal government, the local government of Punjab, and the police in Rawalpindi, where she died in a gun and suicide attack.

The head of the panel, Chilean U.N. Ambassador Heraldo Munoz told reporters in a news conference shortly after the report's release, that none of these entities took the necessary measures to protect her from the extraordinary security risks she faced. "A range of government officials failed profoundly in their efforts; first, to protect Ms. Bhutto; and second, to investigate with vigor all those responsible for her murder -- not only in the execution of the attack, but also in its conception, planning and financing," he said.

He said Ms. Bhutto had a clear understanding of the risks she faced in returning to Pakistan, as did the government of then-President Pervez Musharraf, but it was not adequate for the government to simply inform her of the dangers, it should have taken steps to protect her.

Munoz and the other two commission members -- Indonesian former attorney general Marzuki Darusman and Irish former police official Peter Fitzgerald - and their staff, interviewed more than 250 people inside Pakistan and elsewhere, and examined and analyzed hundreds of documents, videos, photographs and other documentary information during their nine and half month fact-finding investigation.

Among their other conclusions was that actions and omissions by the Rawalpindi police in the immediate aftermath of the assassination - including hosing down the crime scene and failing to collect and preserve evidence - caused irreparable damage to the investigation. "The collection of 23 pieces of evidence was manifestly inadequate in a case that should have resulted in thousands of pieces of evidence," he said.

The panel said a government news conference the day after the assassination was ordered by President Musharraf. During that event, a government official said Ms. Bhutto's death was caused when she hit her head on the lever of her vehicle's escape hatch. The government also blamed Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud and Al-Qaida for the suicide bomber that attacked her convoy.

Ambassador Munoz said those assertions were made well before any proper investigation had been initiated. "This action pre-empted, prejudiced and hindered the subsequent investigation," he said.

Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency, the ISI, also came in for criticism in the report. The commission found that the agency conducted parallel investigations, gathering evidence and detaining suspects, which it selectively shared with police. It also failed to inform police of intelligence it had about terrorist cells targeting Ms. Bhutto.

The report concluded that failures of the police and other officials to react effectively to Ms. Bhutto's assassination were in most cases, deliberate. In other cases, the panel said failures were driven by officials' fears that intelligence agencies were involved.

The panel also criticized authorities for deliberately preventing an autopsy of Ms. Bhutto, saying it impeded a definitive determination on the cause of death.

The commission's report was supposed to be released on March 30, but after a last minute request from Pakistan's government to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a two week delay was agreed.

Ambassador Munoz said no changes were made to the report during that period.

The report was submitted to Mr. Ban Thursday afternoon. He then transmitted it to the Pakistani government, via their U.N. ambassador Abdullah Haroon. It was also to be given to the 15-member U.N. Security Council for 'information purposes.'

Ambassador Haroon abruptly canceled a news conference at U.N. headquarters moments before it was to happen. His spokesman said the government would respond to the report from Islamabad.

The commission's task was only to investigate the facts and circumstances surrounding Ms. Bhutto's death. It was not a criminal investigation. That now lies with the Pakistani authorities.

Could terrorists get hold of a nuclear bomb?

World leaders are heading for Washington to discuss what Barack Obama has described as "the most immediate and extreme threat to global security" - the risk that terrorists could acquire a nuclear bomb. But how likely is this scenario?

A former investigator with the CIA and the US department of energy, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, says there are three headlines that keep him awake at night:

• Pakistani 'loose nukes' in the hands of terrorists

• North Korea supplies terrorists with nuclear bombs

• Al-Qaeda launches nuclear attack

The good news is that he thinks "the odds are stacked against" terrorists acquiring a nuclear bomb.

But the low probability, he argues, has to be weighed against the awfulness of the consequences.

In today's unpredictable world, he writes in an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "a probability-based approach to managing risk" makes less sense than one "focused on mitigating threats in descending order of their possible consequences".

It's an argument that Barack Obama was making long before his election.

"Instead of taking aggressive steps to secure the world's most dangerous technology, [the US has] spent almost $1 trillion to occupy a country in the heart of the Middle East that no longer had any weapons of mass destruction," he said in a speech at Purdue University, Indiana, in July 2008.

Three months later, a commission set up by the US Congress warned that without decisive action it was "more likely than not" that a terrorist attack involving WMD would occur by the end of 2013.

Pakistan

In Rolf Mowatt-Larssen's view, there is "a greater possibility of a nuclear meltdown in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world".

The region has more violent extremists than any other, the country is unstable, and its arsenal of nuclear weapons is expanding.

Once a new plutonium reactor comes on line in the near future "smaller, more lethal plutonium bombs will be produced in greater numbers", he says.

The possibility of a Taliban takeover is, he admits, a "worst-case scenario".

But the Taliban and al-Qaeda are not the only shadows on the Pakistani landscape. There is also the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, which is accused of carrying out the Mumbai attack in November 2008, and like the Pakistani officer corps, recruits mostly in the Punjab.

"As one senior Pakistani general once told me," wrote Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution last week, "the relationship between the army and the Lashkar-e-Taiba is a family affair".

He went on: "Pakistan has taken serious measures to protect the crown jewels of its national security, but it lives in a perilous time. If there is a nightmare nuclear security scenario in Pakistan today it is probably an inside-the-family-job that ends up in a nuclear armageddon in India."

The point is echoed by Ian Kearns of the British American Security Information Council (Basic), who writes of the danger that states could use terrorist groups to attack adversaries "by proxy", engineering nuclear security breakdowns to facilitate terrorist access to weapons or materials.

BBC correspondents say there is every indication that the Pakistani military is in total control of the country's nuclear facilities.

North Korea

The reason North Korea keeps Rolf Mowatt-Larssen awake at night is connected with the mysterious site at al-Kibar in Syria, destroyed by Israeli missiles in 2007.

It's his view that North Korea was helping Syria build a reactor there and that the outside world only found out because of a "windfall of intelligence".

"Taking into account the sobering reality that Kim Jong-il came close to providing Syria with the building blocks for nuclear weapons... how confident can the international community be that there is not a long-running 'AQ Kim' network in North Korea that is analogous to the AQ Khan rogue state nuclear supplier network in Pakistan?" he asks.

The episode showed, in his view, that it is hard enough for the intelligence community to spot state-related clandestine nuclear activity, let alone clandestine nuclear trafficking of non-state actors, which would have a much smaller footprint.

North Korea's "erratic and irresponsible behaviour" makes it a leading potential source for terrorists seeking to acquire nuclear-related technologies and materials, he says.

Al-Qaeda

Though he now works in academia, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen led US efforts to determine whether al-Qaeda possessed a nuclear bomb, in the wake of 9/11.

He doesn't believe it does. But "the group's long-held intent and persistent efforts to acquire nuclear and biological weapons represent a unique means of potentially fulfilling their wildest hopes and aspirations," he writes.

Al-Qaeda's experience on the nuclear black market has taught its planners that its best chance lies in constructing an "improvised nuclear device (IND)," he says.

For this they would need either a quantity of plutonium or 25kg-50kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU), the size of one or two grapefruits.

HEU is held in hundreds of buildings in dozens of countries. "Security measures for many of these stocks are excellent, but security for others is appalling," according to a report published in 2008 by the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

The IAEA registered 15 confirmed cases of unauthorised possession of plutonium or HEU between 1993 and 2008, a few of which involved kilogram-sized quantities. In most cases the quantity was far lower but in some cases the sellers indicated there was more. (If there was, it hasn't been traced.)

There is no global inventory of either material, so no-one can be sure how much has gone missing over the years.

Neither are there agreed international standards for security and accounting of these materials. UN Security Council Resolution 1540 merely calls for "appropriate and effective" measures, without defining this in detail.

"It is a stark and worrying fact, therefore, that nuclear materials and weapons around the world are not as secure as they should be," writes Ian Kearns, in his Basic report.

The main goal of the Washington summit is to make progress on this issue.

Pakistan 'army air strike kills dozens of civilians'

At least 73 civilians were killed when an army jet bombed a remote village in Pakistan's tribal region of Khyber, a local official has told the BBC.

He said the incident took place on Saturday but news was slow in being reported because of the inaccessibility of the region. The jet was involved in operations against Taliban militants in the nearby Orakzai tribal region. Many people have died in air strikes in the area over the past 18 months.

The military insists most of them are militants, but independent sources say many civilians have also been killed. Villagers say another strike - by a US drone missile - killed 13 people on Monday. Gagging order Military spokesman Maj Gen Athar Abbas told Associated Press news agency on Monday that those killed in the Pakistan army air strike were attacked because it had intelligence that militants were gathering at the site.

He denied civilians had died and said the victims were initially reported to be suspected militants, AP said.

Soldeir in northern Pakistan The army is trying to flush militants out of the north Those on the ground gave a different version of events. "All those killed were innocent civilians," the local administration official told the BBC. "The dead include women and children.

Dozens of people were also injured." The official said he could not speak on the record as the military had put a "gagging order" on him to limit the fallout. He said that initial information suggested that the jet had strayed away from the conflict zone and mistook the village for a militant compound. The injured have been moved to hospitals in the nearby city of Peshawar.

They are being treated under strict guard. Police prevented a BBC correspondent from interviewing the injured at the Hayatabad medical complex in Peshawar. Other reporters have also been denied access.

Correspondents say that the army is under heavy pressure from the US to move forcefully against Taliban and al-Qaeda militants in the north-west.

The army regularly reports killing militants in air strikes, but consistently denies it is responsible for civilian deaths.

Relief agencies say the offensives against militants in Pakistan and in neighbouring Afghanistan have displaced more than one million people.

The widower of slain former leader

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - The widower of slain former leader Benazir Bhutto will succeed Pervez Musharraf as president of Pakistan after winning a landslide election victory Saturday.

Unofficial results announced after separate votes in the federal and provincial assemblies showed Asif Ali Zardari winning an overwhelming majority.

Pro-Zardari lawmakers, some in tears, shouted "Long live Bhutto!" as the figures came in. The couple's two jubilant but tearful daughters, one carrying a portrait of their late mother, smiled and hugged friends in the gallery of the National Assembly.
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But Saturday also brought a brutal reminder of the threats to the nuclear-armed nation's stability, when a suicide car bomber killed at least 30 people near the northwestern city of Peshawar.

The blast destroyed a police checkpoint, collapsed several shops nearby and left a three-foot crater in the road. Civilians dug frantically with their hands in hopes of finding survivors.

In other violence in the region, 24 people were killed after residents of villages tired of a "reign of terror" by Islamic militants foiled a militant kidnap attempt, then were attacked, the military said.

A military statement said residents of the town of Tehsil Matta, some 100 miles north of Peshawar, decided to fight back against militants operating in the area. They launched an attack Friday night to prevent a suspected plan to snatch a village elder accused of supporting the government.

Six of the would-be kidnappers were killed. The militants later returned en masse, and ensuing clashes left 15 residents and three more militants dead, along with scores of people injured, the military said.

Already head of the main ruling party, Zardari becomes one of the most powerful civilian leaders in Pakistan's turbulent 61-year history. Last month, he marshaled a coalition that forced longtime U.S. ally Musharraf to quit as head of state.

Zardari, a novice leader untested on the international stage and stained by past corruption allegations, takes over at a critical time for the volatile, nuclear-armed Muslim nation of more than 160 million.

Pakistan's economy is crumbling, and Saturday's attack was the latest in a string of suicide bombings usually claimed by Islamic militants who have steadily gained strength since Pakistan joined the U.S. war on terrorism in 2001.

Washington is pressing Pakistan hard to eradicate Taliban and al-Qaida havens near its border with Afghanistan. An American-led ground attack said to have killed at least 15 in Pakistani territory Wednesday sparked outrage and embarrassed Zardari's party.

U.S. reaction
Rob McInturff, a State Department spokesman, extended congratulations to Zardari.

"Our position has been and has long been that we support the democratic process in Pakistan and we hope the government will focus on the challenges facing the country and the needs of its people," McInturff said.

Government ministers hailed Zardari's expected victory as a triumph for democracy nine years after Musharraf seized power in a military coup.

Musharraf, a former general, stepped down from the army last year, but only after imposing a state of emergency to fend off legal challenges to winning another term, this time as a civilian head of state.

Zardari says he will give some of the powers accumulated by Musharraf back to Parliament, but has not made clear how far he will go, sustaining concern that one strongman is replacing another.

Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik said Saturday's bombing was an attempt to upset the progress of a country riven by ethnic and sectarian divides toward a more stable democratic federation.

If a reported Taliban claim of responsibility proves correct, "They'll have to pay for it," he said.

Like his late wife, Zardari is generally considered a pro-West liberal, and he is not expected to change Pakistan's commitment as an ally in the U.S. war on terrorism despite the recent raid and suspected U.S. missile strikes along the border.

Zardari and senior party officials have matched Musharraf's tough line against terrorism, insisting the battle against militants is Pakistan's own war. But a key test will be how much clout Zardari wields over Pakistan's powerful military, which has failed to halt the Taliban's rise in the nation's northwest despite stop-start battles.

The president has the power to dissolve Parliament and appoint army chiefs, and chairs the joint civilian-military committee that controls Pakistan's nuclear weapons.