By Candace Rondeaux
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 2, 2008
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, March 1 -- Two men accused in the assassination of former prime minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto appeared in a special terrorism court here Saturday, offering a first glimpse into a government-led investigation shrouded in secrecy.
The brief hearing occurred a few miles from the historic park where Bhutto was killed in a suicide bombing in December and less than two weeks after voters swept her party to power in parliamentary elections. The government's investigation has received scant public attention since the Feb. 18 vote, though her party's supporters have expressed deep concerns about it and called for the United Nations to launch an inquiry.
The government of President Pervez Musharraf has said pro-Taliban forces carried out the assassination. Officials have produced little evidence to support their theory, however, fueling public distrust of the inquiry and the government.
Wearing black hoods and with hands in cuffs, Sher Zaman, 32, and Aitazaz Shah, 15, were led into court by a phalanx of police officers Saturday morning. The public and news media were barred from the proceedings, but lawyers at the court familiar with the cases said the two were formally charged with aiding in the assassination plot.
The lawyers, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said three other men arrested last month -- Abdul Rashid, a taxi driver; his cousin Husnain Gul; and a man known only as Rafaqat -- were accused of providing transportation and other assistance.
Police in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, where the suspects are believed to be in custody, have said only that the men helped facilitate the deadly plot.
Police also filed formal charges against Baitullah Mehsud, the top Taliban commander in Pakistan, and four other men accused of planning Bhutto's assassination, according to the Associated Press. Those men remain at large.
Mehsud, who operates in the volatile tribal area of South Waziristan, has denied the charges, saying that tribal code prohibits attacks on women and that the accusations are a government diversionary tactic.
Several lawyers familiar with the case said Shah and Zaman are accused of supplying a vest packed with explosives to a suicide bomber and ammunition to gunmen who fired several shots before the bomb was detonated as Bhutto was leaving a political rally in Rawalpindi.
Chaudhry Abdul Majid, head of the police division that is conducting the investigation, declined recently to comment on the case.
Farhatullah Babar, a top spokesman for Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, said the charges against Shah were particularly "dubious" because court records indicate that he has been in police custody since October on unrelated charges.
"We really believe that this kind of sophisticated operation was beyond them," he said. "The planning, the materials, the execution was done by someone much more sophisticated who was behind them."
Zaman's father, Akbar Jan, called the charges "baseless" and said authorities have barred his son from having contact with his attorney and family since his arrest in Pakistan's troubled North-West Frontier Province.
Zaman grew up in a conservative religious family and studied finance in South Waziristan, a restive tribal area in northwestern Pakistan. For several years, he worked for the government telephone company and later started a car sales business, his father said. He also worked for a year in a government office that administered affairs in South Waziristan.
Zaman's father said his son was in their home town, Dera Ismail Khan, on the day of Bhutto's assassination. Zaman, one of his six sons and a nephew were arrested the same day, he said. The two young boys were left blindfolded on the side of a road in a remote area of the province, he said.
"Since then, I have not seen nor had any contact with my son despite many attempts and many requests to the authorities," he said.
Shah, the 15-year-old suspect, is from the northwestern town of Mansehra and studied at a madrassa, or religious school, in Karachi, a local police official said. According to police and Zaman's relatives, Shah told police that Zaman and the three other jailed suspects were involved in the plot.
Suspicions about the legitimacy of the government investigation began immediately after the blast, as police hosed down the bomb site and destroyed much of the physical evidence.
Last month, Scotland Yard investigators concluded that Bhutto had been killed by the impact of the bomb blast and not by gunfire, as was widely suspected immediately after her death. The report concurred with the Pakistani government's assertion that a head injury Bhutto sustained in the blast had caused her death but concluded that there was only one assassin, contrary to earlier speculation that two men had carried out the attack.
The report did not rule out the possibility that Bhutto might also have been struck by gunfire but said that only a postmortem examination could have provided conclusive evidence of bullet wounds.
Her family declined an autopsy.
Special correspondents Imtiaz Ali in Peshawar and Shahzad Khurram in Islamabad contributed to this report.
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