BRITISH officials have revealed that evidence amassed by Scotland Yard detectives points towards Al-Qaeda militants being responsible for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Five experts in video evidence and forensic science have been in Pakistan for 10 days since President Pervez Musharraf took up an offer from Gordon Brown for British help in the investigation of the December 27 killing. Last week they were joined by three specialists in explosives.

Bhutto’s murder as she left a rally she had been addressing in Rawalpindi sparked an international outcry. Her body was flown home to be buried with no postmortem examination. Companions insist the cause of death - a bullet wound in her neck - was obvious.

Claims by the government that she had fractured her skull on the sunroof of her car while escaping the blast from a suicide bomb prompted fury from party supporters who insisted she had been shot before the explosion.

Q&A: the murder of Benazir Bhutto

Times South Asia Correspondent asks who had most to gain from killing the Pakistan People's Party leader

Multimedia

• Video: Bhutto assassinated

• Bhutto: the background, legacy and life

• Pictures: death of Benazir Bhutto

BACKGROUND

• Pakistan in chaos as Benazir Bhutto assassinated

• Who killed Benazir Bhutto? Main suspects

• Obituary: Benazir Bhutto, 1953-2007

• Can democracy survive Bhutto killing?

Multimedia

• Pakistan in pictures and video

When footage of the incident clearly revealed a man waving a pistol in the crowd, the government was accused of a cover-up.

Musharraf was quick to blame the killing on Baitullah Mehsud, a tribal leader from the Afghan border area of southern Waziristan with links to Al-Qaeda. The interior ministry released a transcript of a purported telephone conversation between Mehsud and a militant cleric in which, though Bhutto’s name was not mentioned, he appeared to congratulate him on the death, saying: “Fantastic job. Very brave boys, the ones who killed her.”

The transcript was met with scepticism. Critics pointed out Mehsud had previously been working with the Pakistan military, receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars and that if the country’s intelligence services could tape his conversations, they should be able to capture him.

Last August Mehsud humiliated Musharraf when his men captured more than 250 Pakistani soldiers and paramilitary troops, who surrendered without firing a shot. Mehsud demanded the release of 30 jailed militants and the end of Pakistani military operations in his tribal area as the price for their freedom. To show he meant business, he ordered the beheading of three of his hostages. Musharraf gave in.

“Linking Mehsud to Bhutto’s assassination was done for strategic reasons and had nothing to do with the ground realities,” said Sajjan Gohel, an expert on Al-Qaeda.

“Although Mehsud has ideological sympathies with the Taliban, his influence does not extend beyond the tribal areas and he certainly does not have the resources to plan an attack in the centre of the country like the assassination of Bhutto.”

But British and American officials, who have examined the transcript, say they believe it is genuine and share Musharraf’s view that Mehsud is behind most of the suicide bombings in Pakistan.

Asked why Pakistani forces do not capture Mehsud, one official said: “It’s not so easy to go into tribal areas. Look what happened to the last lot of Pakistani soldiers that tried.” According to diplomats, Mehsud had dispatched teams of suicide bombers round the country to follow Bhutto to rallies and seize an opportunity to kill her.

The gun fired at Bhutto has been checked for fingerprints by the Scotland Yard detectives. A government minister told The Sunday Times that these have been traced through identity cards to a man in Swat, an area where Mehsud’s men have been fighting.

“There was no cover-up,” he insisted. “It was just unfortunate that in all the shock and confusion at the beginning, people shot their mouths off talking about sunroofs rather than simply saying it would be investigated.”

Scotland Yard has insisted that its task is not to establish who killed her but only how she died.

Even that is not straightforward. They cannot examine the body, and the crime scene and Bhutto’s vehicle were both scrubbed within hours.

Every day another conspiracy theory emerges. It is now widely believed that the gun had a laser sight, suggesting military complicity, or that a sniper may have been in a nearby building.

Musharraf met the British detectives last week for a briefing and later said he expected them to have reached a conclusion about how she died before elections scheduled for February 18.

Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, has rejected the Scotland Yard inquiry and demanded a wider-ranging United Nations-led investigation that would also look into the bombing of Bhutto’s bus in Karachi in October.

“She was a world leader,” he said. “We don’t just want a sergeant from Scotland Yard determining the angle of fire. She’s dead - that’s the proof. We have the footage, we have the doctors who were trying to rescue her.”

It has never been established who was behind the mysterious plane crash that killed General Zia, Pakistan’s last military dictator in 1988; who murdered Bhutto’s brother Murtaza in a Karachi shootout in 1996; or who killed its first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan, who was shot dead in 1951 yards from where Bhutto died.

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