Lead detective off Pakistan bombing case
KARACHI, Pakistan - The detective leading Pakistan’s inquiry into the suicide attack on Benazir Bhutto withdrew from the case Wednesday after the former prime minister accused him of involvement in the torture of her husband in 1999, a senior official said.
Ghulam Muhammad Mohtarem, home secretary of Sindh province, said the government would form a new team to investigate the deadly attack on Bhutto’s homecoming parade in Karachi last week. The bombing killed 136 people and raised fears about the country’s stability.
Bhutto has blamed Islamic militants for the attack but has also accused elements in the government and the security services of complicity. She wants international experts to help with the investigation.
The two-term prime minister specifically objected to Manzur Mughal, a senior investigator in Sindh province, claiming he had been present while her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, was tortured in custody on corruption charges in 1999.
Mohtarem said that the provincial government had no doubt about Mughal’s competency and professionalism, but that Mughal decided to withdraw to protect the inquiry from accusations of bias.
Concerns about Islamic militancy in the country were underlined Wednesday when the government announced it had sent 2,500 soldiers into a remote valley to combat a militant cleric who calls for Taliban-style rule in Pakistan.
But the attempt at intimidation apparently fell flat, as some 6,000 supporters of the cleric, Maulana Fazlullah, gathered in a schoolyard to hear him speak just a few miles from where the soldiers deployed.
Fazlullah addressed the crowd from the back of a truck with a dozen armed men standing around him as bodyguards. “The government has made a declaration of war,” he said, according to a local journalist who was at the scene. “Is it a crime to sit in the home of Allah and to study the Quran?”
Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad said the troops were deployed Tuesday across Swat, a mountain valley some 30 miles north of the city of Peshawar. Militants responded by detonating a remote-controlled bomb near a convoy late Tuesday, wounding four soldiers. Arshad said seven suspects had been detained.
Fazlullah leads Tehrik Nifaz-e-Sharia Mohammed, a pro-Taliban group that sent thousands of volunteers into neighboring Afghanistan during the U.S.-led invasion there in late 2001. Pakistan later banned the group and jailed its founder, Fazlullah’s father-in-law.