Friday, July 17, 2009
By Zulfiqar Ghuman

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) approached the UN for investigating the assassination of Benazir Butto because the party wanted a transparent account of the incident without raising any issues of bias, President Asif Ali Zardari said on Thursday.

He said this while talking to the three-member UN Inquiry Commission, which called on the president to begin the countdown of the sixth-month investigations on the circumstances leading to the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007.

The UN includes Chile’s UN envoy Heraldo Munoz, former Indonesian jurist Marzuki Darusman, and Peter Fitzgerald, a veteran of the Irish National Police.

The meeting was also attended by Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Interior Minister Rehman Malik, Attorney General Sardar Latif Khosa, State Minister for Law Afzal Sindhu, Secretary-General to President Salman Faruqui and Interior Secretary Kamal Shah.

Briefing the media, the president’s spokesman Farhatullah Babar said that the president thanked the UN and its Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for setting up the UN Commission. The president reiterated the rationale behind the decision of the government to request a UN probe and said the mission was faced with a “challenging and onerous” task.

“We approached the UN because firstly we wanted transparent and aboveboard investigations so that there were no accusations of bias. We also wanted to unearth any conspiracy to balkanise Pakistan and let the world know how a democratic leader had heroically laid down her life for the good of her country,” Babar quoted the president as saying to the members of the UN team.

“The UN had passed resolutions condemning the assassination and the need to expose the organisers, perpetrator and financiers of the crime and it was befitting that the world body formed its own fact finding commission,” he said.