UN investigation into Bhutto’s assassination

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan’s Parliament unanimously passed a resolution seeking a U.N. investigation into the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, officials from her party said on Tuesday.
Lawmakers in the National Assembly, or lower house of Parliament, adopted the resolution late Monday, urging the government to ask the UN to look into Bhutto’s assassination in a gun and suicide bombing attack in December, said Izhar Amrohvi, secretary for parliamentary affairs in Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party.
President Pervez Musharraf has blamed a Taleban militant leader, Baitullah Mehsud, for the attack in Rawalpindi, a garrison city near the capital Islamabad. Mehsud has reportedly denied involvement.
Amrohvi said the parliamentary resolution will be forwarded to the foreign ministry to contact the UN for a probe.
Law Minister Farooq Naek, who introduced the resolution, said it sought a U.N. mandated international commission to identify culprits, perpetrators, organizers and financiers behind the heinous crime and bring them to justice,” state-run Radio Pakistan quoted him as saying on Monday.
Musharraf has opposed a UN probe but allowed British police to look into what caused Bhutto’s death.
The British investigation concluded that Bhutto died after slamming her head against the roof of her bulletproof sports utility vehicle during the attack. Bhutto party officials claimed that she died from an assassin’s bullet.
Pakistan’s new government and Parliament are dominated by a coalition of anti-Musharraf groups led by Bhutto’s party. They won parliamentary elections in February mainly on opposition to Musharraf’s increasingly authoritarian rule and his handling of the US-led war against terrorism.
Bhutto’s party had pledged to ask the U.N. to investigate her killing, and vowed to undo some of Musharraf’s key constitutional amendments and reinstate senior independent-minded judges the former army chief sacked under a state of emergency in November.