Islamabad An anti-terrorism court (ATC) in Pakistan announced the verdict in the Benazir Bhutto murder case on Thursday, acquitting five Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) suspects and announcing 17-year imprisonment for two police officials.
The ATC also declared former President Gen (rtd) Pervez Musharraf an absconder in the case. The ATC had named Musharraf in the case in February 2011.
Saud Aziz, who was police chief of Rawalpindi when Bhutto was assassinated in 2007, and Khurram Shahzad, a former Superintendent of Police (SP) at Rawal Town, were each awarded 17 years in prison. The two, who were out on bail, have already been arrested.
The two former policemen have each been awarded 10 years in prison under Section 119 of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) and seven years each under Section 201 of the PPC.
They have also been fined Rs500,000 each; in case they do not pay the fine, they will have to spend another six months in jail, said the court.
Aziz and Shahzad, who had been released on bail in 2011, were accused of negligence in security arrangements which subsequently led to the assassination of the former prime minister in a gun-and-bomb attack outside Rawalpindis Liaquat Bagh on Dec 27, 2007.
The five TTP suspects Rafaqat Hussain, Husnain Gul, Sher Zaman, Aitzaz Shah and Abdul Rashid have beean cleared of all charges in the murder trial.
Bhutto, the Pakistan Peoples Party chief and a two-time prime minister, was killed along with more than 20 people in a gun and bomb attack in Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh during an election campaign rally on December 27, 2007. She was 54.
The case was registered soon after her assassination and the trial went through many ups and down until it concluded yesterday in Rawalpindi.
Judge Asghar Khan announced the verdict, declaring Musharraf a proclaimed offender and ordered seizure of his property.
Musharraf, 74, has been living in Dubai since last year when he was allowed to leave Pakistan on pretext of medical treatment.
A joint investigation team implicated Musharraf in the case, saying that his government did not provide adequate security to the former prime minister despite her repeated requests.
Apart from Musharraf, five other men Baitullah Mehsud, Ahmad Gul, Iqramullah, Abdullah, and Faizullah have been declared absconders.
“10 years later and we still await justice. Abettors punished but those truly guilty of my mothers murder roam free,” Bhutto’s daughter Aseefa Bhutto Zardari tweeted soon after the verdict was announced.
“There will be no justice till Pervez Musharraf answers for his crimes,” she tweeted.
Bhutto’s another daughter Bakhtawar Bhutto Zardari tweeted, “Musharraf ordered crime scene washed & doors locked trapping SMBB vehicle inside #ArrestMusharraf.”
Pakistan Peoples Party leader Sheila Raza also expressed dissatisfaction over the verdict. “We had reservations over the probe and the FIR lodged by the government,” she said.
Eight different judges heard the case during this period who were changed due to different reasons.
A UN mission had conducted the probe into Bhuttos murder.
Heraldo Munoz of Chile, the head of the UN commission, concluded: Probably no government will be able or willing to fully disentangle the truth from the complex web of implication in Benazir Bhuttos assassination.
Initially TTP chief Baitullah Mehsud was blamed for murder and Musharraf government issued a taped conversation of Mehsud with a certain operator in which he was congratulating the operator for the murder.
But FIA Chief Prosecutor Mohammad Azhar Chaudhry in his concluding arguments disowned the evidence of audio record and transcript of telephonic conversation.
He termed it a cooked up story by Musharraf to mislead the investigators and to save himself.
Benazir Bhutto: A life that mirrored Pakistan’s turbulence
The first female prime minister of a Muslim nation, Pakistan’s slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was an aristocrat embraced by the poor who said her own life mirrored Pakistan’s “turbulence, its tragedies and its triumphs”.
Hailed by the West as a moderate in the world’s only Islamic nuclear power, Bhutto was a shrewd but divisive figure at home where she was mired in corruption allegations and despised by religious extremists.
“I didn’t choose this life, it chose me,” she wrote in her 1988 memoir, “Daughter of the East”.
The 54-year-old graduate of Oxford and Harvard was killed December 27, 2007, little more than two months after returning from exile as she campaigned to return to power.
The most definitive accounts of Bhutto’s death show an assassin shot her in the neck and then blew himself up, killing 24 people.
She was laid to rest beside her father, former premier Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who was hanged in 1979 on the orders of military dictator Zia ul-Haq, propelling his daughter to carry on his legacy.
Nearly ten years later, showers of fresh rose petals over the grave show how deeply she is still mourned in her family’s power base in Sindh province — revered almost as a saint rather than a politician.
Hundreds of devotees visit daily — thousands on her birthday and death anniversary — lighting incense and reciting the Koran inside the white-marbled family shrine reminiscent of India’s Taj Mahal.
Benazir Bhutto was born in 1953 — six years after Pakistan was created as a Muslim homeland out of British-ruled India — the eldest of four children in a powerful family dynasty in Sindh.
Like her father, Benazir’s gaze was turned to the West from an early age, although she nonetheless accepted an arranged marriage to businessman Asif Ali Zardari, with whom she had three children.
Bhutto headed to Britain after Zia deposed her father. From exile, she maintained a firm grip on the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), sometimes to the resentment of allies who believed she ran it as a family fiefdom.
Despite her affection for London’s posh Harrods department store, Bhutto returned to Pakistan to run as a populist, rallying through the countryside with her trademark loose white veil.
After Zia died in a mysterious plane crash in 1988, Bhutto — at the age of just 35 — became the first female prime minister of an Islamic country.
But observers said that, without full control over the civil and military establishments, she was never able to govern properly.
She was elected twice and both times thrown out of office on corruption allegations.
Bhutto and her husband also faced a raft of corruption charges overseas, which they denied.
On Saturday, just days before the first verdicts in the trial of his wife’s murder were announced, a Pakistani accountability court found Zardari innocent of a corruption case filed against him in 1998.
– Return to Pakistan –
Bhutto went back into exile in 1999 when military leader Pervez Musharraf took over in a bloodless coup.
She again shrewdly worked her contacts in the West, casting herself as the force who could save Pakistan from Islamic militancy.
Her heralded return in 2007 was quickly marred by a suicide attack that killed 139 people. Musharraf declared a state of emergency, prompting international criticism and a backlash within Pakistan.
Before she was killed, Bhutto was hoping for a third term in power in 2008 elections.
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