Bhutto's party says Musharraf failed to prevent her death

The Pakistan Peoples Party, led by former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto before she was slain in 2007, said Saturday it accepts a United Nations commission report into her death and placed blame on former Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf for failing to prevent it.

A three-member U.N. inquiry commission, in a scathing report issued Thursday, said Musharraf's military-led government failed to protect Bhutto and that the suicide bombing that killed her "could have been prevented." The panel said police deliberately failed to pursue an effective investigation into her death.

A core group of PPP members met Saturday to discuss the report, the party said in a statement. Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's current president and Bhutto's widower, presided over the meeting. Those present "considered the U.N. report and accepted it," the Saturday statement said.

"The meeting reiterated that the report has endorsed the party position that Gen. Pervez Musharraf was responsible for the assassination of Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto," the PPP statement said, adding that Bhutto "also believed that Gen. Musharraf wanted to eliminate her" and had mentioned it on several occasions.

Bhutto had returned from a self-imposed eight-year exile to run in the country's general elections two months before her assassination and already had escaped one attempt on her life. She was killed in December 2007 by a 15-year-old suicide bomber while campaigning in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, the seat of the country's military.

"No one believes that this boy acted alone," the U.N. report states. "A range of government officials failed profoundly in their efforts first to protect Ms. Bhutto, and second to investigate with vigor all those responsible for her murder, not only in the execution of the attack, but also in its conception, planning and financing."
But the report stops short of identifying a particular culprit.

A spokesman for Musharraf said Friday that the government offered adequate protection for Bhutto. "I believe the government at the time did whatever they thought was reasonable," said Muhammad Ali Saif, a spokesman and adviser to the former president.

"It was repeatedly stressed [to Bhutto] that she should be careful because of numerous credible threats against her," the spokesman said. "Unfortunately, she did not heed these requests and she went ahead and took part in the procession. The government did take whatever reasonable measures to protect her.
"There's no prescribed standard for maximum or minimum security. The very fact that she deemed it necessary go to a public meeting shows that she herself was satisfied with the level of security the government provided."

Pakistan's government and the CIA blamed the killing on Baitullah Mehsud, a top Pakistani Taliban leader with ties to al Qaeda. Mehsud was killed last year in a suspected U.S. drone strike.

The PPP on Saturday, said spokesman Farhatullah Babar, "reiterated its resolve to expose and bring to justice all those - including Gen. Pervez Musharraf - who planned, abetted and indulged in the criminal acts, screened off the offenders and destroyed the evidence."

He said the party recommended to the prime minister "to take appropriate legal actions in light of the report of the U.N. Inquiry Commission which ... calls upon the competent authorities in Pakistan to make a determination of the criminal responsibility for planning and carrying out the assassination."

The U.N. report found that police failed to preserve evidence at the scene of the bombing and said the investigation "suffered from a lack of commitment to identify and bring all of the perpetrators to justice." In particular, the "pervasive reach" of Pakistan's intelligence agencies left police "unsure of how vigorously they ought to pursue actions, which they knew, as professionals, they should have taken," the report states.

Babar said earlier that the report would "lend speed and strength to the domestic investigation that is ongoing."
The U.N. commission's chairman, Chilean U.N. Ambassador Heraldo Munoz, said the panel's role was "fact-finding" and not prosecutorial. Asked whether the failure to protect Bhutto was deliberate, he said, "it is not up to us to make inferences." But he added, "It is clear that warnings were passed on, on various occasions, and Ms. Bhutto received also information in this regard from outside Pakistan.

"Nevertheless, what we have found is that the passing of information was not accompanied by commensurate measures to protect her, particularly given the fact that an assassination attempt had been made against her the very day she returned to Karachi, [Pakistan]," he said.

Nationwide polls conducted shortly after Bhutto's death found that a majority of Pakistanis believed Musharraf's government was complicit in the assassination. Bhutto's supporters took to the streets after her killing. The ensuing riots left 58 dead and more than $200 million in property damage.

Bhutto's return to Pakistan came amid a struggle between the country's political leaders and Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup. At the same time, the country was besieged by a surge of attacks by Islamic extremists.

During Bhutto's first night back in her homeland, a pair of bombs went off near her armored truck, killing 149 people and wounding more than 400.

Further heightening tensions, Musharraf declared a state of emergency in November 2007, suspending the constitution, sacking the country's chief justice for a second time and imposing what amounted to martial law.
Thursday's report criticized the influence of Pakistan's intelligence agencies in the country's government, including efforts to influence elections and the courts. "This pervasive involvement of intelligence agencies in diverse spheres, which is an open secret, has undermined the rule of law, distorted civilian-military relations and weakened some political and law enforcement institutions," the report states. "At the same time, it has contributed to widespread public distrust in those institutions and fed a generalized political culture that thrives on competing conspiracy theories."

The Pakistan Peoples Party went on to win the most number of seats in elections held in 2008, and Musharraf resigned. Zardari asked the United Nations to look into his wife's death after taking office, and he was one of the more than 250 people interviewed by the commission.

Bhutto faced threats from "a number of sources," including al Qaeda, the Taliban and local Islamic militants and "potentially" from Pakistan's ruling establishment, the report states.

Two months before her death, she wrote a letter to Musharraf that identified three people she considered threats to her safety. But Pakistan's government failed to investigate Mehsud, al Qaeda or other organizations that might have been involved, according to the U.N. report.

"Investigators also dismissed the possibility of involvement by elements of the establishment, including the three persons identified by Ms. Bhutto as threats to her in her 16 October 2007 letter to Gen. Musharraf," the report states.

U.N. officials said the question of whether to reopen a criminal investigation into Bhutto's assassination now lies with Pakistan.

"We cannot accuse or absolve anyone," Munoz said. "That is not our task. That is the task of the competent authorities in Pakistan."

Parents demand answers from Israel in bulldozer death

A 23-year-old American activist stands in front of an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza. The bulldozer drives over her, crushing her to death. These are the facts. Rachel Corrie, along with colleagues from the International Solidarity Movement, was trying to prevent Israel from bulldozing homes in Rafah, close to the Egyptian border. Her activism cost her her life in March 2003.
A colleague said at the time, "Many times the bulldozer came up to us and buried us with dirt, but they always stopped."
Corrie's parents want to know the truth about their daughter's death, whether the killing was intentional and who is accountable.
Craig and Cindy Corrie's civil suit against Israel's defense ministry starts in Haifa, Israel, on Wednesday -- a court date that took years to reach.
"The more we found out, the more likely that the killing was intentional, or at least incredibly reckless," Craig Corrie said. "And, as a former soldier, I was even in charge of bulldozers in Vietnam... You're responsible to know what's in front of that blade, and I believe that they did."
The Israeli military carried out a month-long investigation, which found no Israeli soldier was to blame.
"The armored bulldozer crew involved in the incident did not see Ms. Corrie, who was standing behind the mound of earth, and was unable to see her or hear her voice," the military said.
Corrie's parents are proud of what their daughter did, recalling how important it was to her to help Palestinian families in Gaza.
In an interview shortly before her death, Rachel Corrie, who grew up in Olympia, Washington, said, "There are just countless ways in which these children are suffering. I want to support them."
Her mother, Cindy Corrie, told , "She deserves the attention that she's receiving in this case. Every human being who is assaulted and whose life is taken in this way deserves some accountability, some explanation for why this happened, particularly when it's done by a military and particularly when it's a military supported by me and my tax dollars."
The Corries say they cannot take the bulldozer driver to court, because the Israeli military has refused to identify him for the past seven years. But Craig Corrie doesn't necessarily want to see the driver sent to jail.

"We don't think about the soldiers being the victims, but they are, and we ask a lot of these people. So I'm not full of hatred for this person, but it was a horrendous act to kill my daughter, and I hope he understands that."

On Afghan Road, Scenes of Beauty and Death

Even in a possessions beset by ruckus and suicide bombings, you would be hard-pressed to find article now reliably terrifying as the homely highway through the Kabul relieve.

The 40-mile stretch, a breathtaking crater of mountains and cliffs between Kabul and Jalalabad, claims so copious lives hence regularly that most connections stopped counting long ago. Cars flip and flatten. Trucks soar to the valley floor. Buses play chicken; buses collide.

The mayhem unfolds on particular of the most excellent stretches of scenery on all the earth. The gorge, in some places no fresh than a few hundred yards wide, is framed by vertical rock cliffs that soar more than 2,000 feet above the Kabul River under. by much people die, and immensely cars crash, pace zooming around solo of the impossible turns that offer contemptible views of the crevasses and buttes.

Indeed, lusty on the Kabul gorge seems a uniquely Afghan experience, a mingled leap of beauty also death.

“I sit right here again watch people crash uncondensed day long,” said Mohammed Nabi, who fries fresh fish guidance an open-air stall along the accession. “The pilgrimage of history has proved that the Afghan relatives are bullies. This is why we cannot drive safely.”

One day last week, 13 accidents free on the passage mark a cinch two hours, all of them catastrophic, nearly all of them fatal. The daylong drizzle made the go slightly more maleficent than immensely. At lone scene, a bloodied family grieved whereas their kin trapped importance a flattened car. At another, a minibus lay crushed beneath the hulk of a jackknifed ride. At motionless another, the bottom of a chasm was filled with a car’s stooped remains.

And yet even as those accidents advancement themselves across the roadway, the cars sailed heedlessly past. Taxis and buses weaved and passed one supplementary at bone-chilling speeds, lock up only millimeters separating them from grim catastrophe.

“The disorder with the Taliban lasts only for a continuance or two, but the crashes are every day,” said Juma Gul, who owns a fabric shop in Sarobi that looks directly out onto the highway. “It’s a cordial of theater. Sometimes, a car will go by money the air.”

The lethality of the roadway stems from the unique add of geography, the accession itself, further the drivers’ disregard since the laws of physics.

The two-lane highway is barely wide enough for two cars to pass. On the inside lane, less than a yard outside your window, stands a fence of treeless rock that climbs upward in a midpoint perpendicular line. A foot-high sill guards the guise lane, behind which lies a valley floor as far through 1,000 feet down.

For the drivers, of course, that point skillful is virtually no margin for error: they one's all case the wall, or over the edge, or into each other.

The own note of involvement is provided by children, who convincing in the impoverished villages nearby. Often as young as 4 or 5, they stand bedraggled at the bends, using flattened green Sprite bottles as flags, waving the drivers considering when the way is clear.

Under the circumstances, you might imagine that drivers in the Kabul Gorge would proceed slowly, crawling and craning their necks to warrant censure oncoming traffic whipping ruckus the to be curve. credit fact, due to most of history, they did.

Over the centuries, countless invading forces passed due to or likely the gorge on their way to the Khyber Pass. Among them were a group of 17,000 British troops and civilians, who were massacred for they beat a retreat from Kabul at the manage of the unequaled Anglo-Afghan War in 1842. Dr. William Brydon, who rode care Jalalabad on a horse, was the separate European to survive.

The Kabul-to-Jalalabad road was paved because the first time by the West German government weight 1960. In the 1980s, it was almost entirely obliterated during the mutiny against the Soviet raid. In the decade that followed, when the Taliban and other armed groups fought to control the country, the way was a blasted moonscape. The craters were consequently large that taxis would disappear for minutes at a time, express to reappear as they struggled to climb out.

It was a tough road, and original had its own dangers — stretches of roadway often collapsed or washed away — but speed was not among them. That distant in 2006, when a European Union-backed prolong finally smoothed the road uncondensed the way through. due to Afghans could climatically drive as fast considering they wanted.

And they do! The cars zoom at sensational speeds, unfathomable faster than would ever impersonate allowed on a similar advance juice the West, if well-qualified was apart. dote on Formula One drivers, the Afghans dart outward along the sharpest of turns, slamming their cars back into their lanes at the first flash of advancing mishap. Most of the situation they make it.

The danger is marked by other things. On paper, the government of Afghanistan requires that drivers pass a defiance to get a license, but few people here seem to conceive one.

Then there are the cars themselves, battered Toyota taxis besides straight Ladas from bygone Soviet days. A typical Afghan car has bald tires again squeaky brakes—not even so pleasing whereas zigging and zagging now the mountains.

But perhaps the gravest threat, apart from speed of the cars, is the slowness of the trucks. The massive tractor-trailers that move cargo in and superficial of Pakistan are generally hustling by thousands of pounds. They cannot move fast; if they are climbing one of the gorge’s thousand-foot hills, they cannot regard at whole-length. They carry out stuck. They wrench lead. They fall over.

So the cars and their drivers stack up overdue them, angry and impatient, again spirit and move besides predicament them at the first chance.

And so the cars crash, one adjacent the other.

Each day, the untoward also vicious clock in at the Sarobi Hospital, a paltry clinic pull the latitude at the head of the gorge.

“Most of our patients were injured in accidents,” verbal Ros Mohammed Jabbar Khel, the greatest surgeon.

Dr. Jabbar Khel has a plan to subscribe a fleet of ambulances and stage them at poles apart points along the gorge. That way, he figures, he could have a lot of lives. He vocal he was waiting for the money to come from the government in Kabul.

Dr. Jabbar Khel himself drives the gorge several times a second. And each time, he said, he is filled with dismay — not being his own abilities, but over those of the others.

“I have a license!” the doctor verbal. “I took lessons!”