Pakistan People's Party (PPP) will call on the United Nations for an inquiry into its late chairperson's assassination if it forms a government after elections next month, a party spokesman said on Sunday.
The PPP has aired deep suspicions over the motives and identities of Benazir's assassins, who launched a gun and bomb attack against her at the end of a campaign rally in Rawalpindi on December 27.
"If the PPP comes to power, we will ask the UN to hold an inquiry," said Farhatullah Babar, accusing the government of shielding the culprits. "The government's position on the assassination has been shifting from day to day."
The government blamed al Qaeda and initially said Benazir was killed when the blast threw her head against the sun-roof lever of the car in which she was standing, despite TV footage showing a gunman firing at her head a split second before.
The official version, which also contradicted witness reports of gunshot wounds, has stoked suspicions among Pakistanis that government or military elements opposed to the transition to a civilian-led democracy were behind the attack.
On Saturday, CBS News quoted President Pervez Musharraf as conceding that a gunman might have shot Bhutto after all. "The Scotland Yard team, if it contacts the PPP, we will extend its cooperation but we believe that the Scotland Yard investigation has already been circumscribed," Babar said.
He said Benazir had named several people she suspected were out to kill her in a letter sent to Musharraf last month, but Babar said it was clear that those named would not be probed. "If the Scotland Yard team cannot investigate the people named in Benazir's letter ... what use is an inquiry?" he said.
Benazir was buried the day after her killing, in keeping with Muslim custom, without a post mortem.
Her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, now the party's de facto leader, declined to comment on Sunday. He has not said yet whether the family would agree to the exhumation of Benazir's body without the formation of a full UN inquiry. "I don't want to respond to anything at the moment," he said by phone from Dubai.
In an opinion article in Saturday's Washington Post, Zardari called for a new caretaker government to be named to oversee a national election that was postponed until February 18 from January 8.
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