FILE: Benazir Bhutto assassination in focus after investigating prosecutor is shot dead

Record ID: 618407

  • Title: FILE: Benazir Bhutto assassination in focus after investigating prosecutor is shot dead
  • Date: 3rd May 2013
  • Summary: PEOPLE WALKING AROUND SCENE AFTER BLAST
  • Embargoed: 18th May 2013 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Pakistan
  • Country: Pakistan
  • Topics: Crime,Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA2LNGT4GJIRS8XN3634SQAZIKF
  • Story Text: A prosecutor investigating the 2007 assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was shot dead by gunmen on a motorcycle on Friday (May 3).
    Police sources said Chaudhry Zulfikar was shot in his car after he left home and headed to a hearing in the case, a reminder of Pakistan's instability just a week before general elections.
    Bhutto's assassination is shrouded in mystery.
    She was killed in a gun and suicide bomb attack carried out by a 15-year-old boy after an election rally in the city of Rawalpindi, weeks after she returned to Pakistan from years in self-imposed exile.
    A report by a U.N. commission of inquiry released in 2010 said any credible investigation should not rule out the possibility that members of Pakistan's military and security establishment were involved.
    Bhutto was a fierce critic of Pakistan's Taliban and Islamist groups that had been patronized by elements of Pakistan's military. She was deeply mistrusted by the security establishment.
    Speculation has lingered that Bhutto was the victim of a plot by allies of General Pervez Musharraf, the president at the time, who did not want her to come to power.
    Her assassination in December 2007 was not the first attack on her life. In October of that year a suspected suicide bomber killed 115 people in an attack targeting the former Pakistani Prime Minister as she was driven through Karachi on her return from eight years of exile.
    Bhutto was unhurt, leaving the truck that had been transporting her through streets crowded with hundreds of thousands of well-wishers before the explosion occurred.
    After the October 2007 attack, Bhutto said she wanted to avoid bloodshed but was willing to risk her life.
    "We want to avoid loss of life, but I also want to say that if it means sacrificing our lives, if it means sacrificing our liberty, to save Pakistan, and to save democracy because we believe that only democracy alone can save Pakistan from disintegration and a militant take-over, then we are prepared to risk our lives, and we are prepared to risk our liberty. But we are not prepared to surrender our great nation to the militants," she said.
    The killing of the prosecutor on Friday comes days after a Pakistani court put Musharraf on a 14-day judicial remand for charges of failing to provide adequate security for Bhutto before her assassination.
    The former army chief, who has always denied responsibility for Bhutto's death, returned to Pakistan in March after nearly four years of self-imposed exile to contest the May 11 general election. But has since been banned from politics for life.
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