United Nations: Delivery of a UN report on the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been delayed by over two weeks at the urgent request of Pakistan, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
The report follows a nine-month inquiry by a three-person UN panel and was due to be presented on Tuesday to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. But Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto's widower, requested a delay until April 15, UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said.
Nesirky gave no reason for the Pakistani request, which he said had arrived overnight.
In Islamabad, Pakistan's information minister said his country had asked for the delay so that the panel could get input from two former heads of state, who he said had warned Bhutto there could be a threat to her life.
The two heads of state, whom he declined to name, "could be helpful to the commission in finding who was behind her assassination," the minister, Qamar Zaman Kaira, told Reuters.
The panel, headed by Chile's UN Ambassador Heraldo Munoz, looked into the circumstances surrounding the attack that killed Bhutto after an election campaign rally in Rawalpindi city on Dec. 27, 2007.
"The Secretary-General has accepted an urgent request by the President of Pakistan to delay the presentation of the report ... until 15 April 2010," Nesirky told reporters.
But he said the panel had told Ban "that, as of today, all relevant facts and circumstances have been explored, and the report is now complete and ready to be delivered."
Report complete
Although Nesirky said Ban would not have accepted the Pakistani request without good reason, he suggested there could now be no change to the report. "My understanding is, and the guidance that I have is, that this is complete, it's done, it's not to be added to," he said.
Neither Ban nor the Pakistani government had seen the report, Nesirky said. The UN chief set up the panel in July at the request of Pakistan's coalition government, led by Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party.
The previous government, headed by allies of former president and army chief Pervez Musharraf, blamed then Pakistani Taliban leader and al Qaeda ally Baitullah Mehsud for Bhutto's murder. Mehsud was killed in a U.S. drone strike last August.
The panel, whose original six-month mandate had already been extended by three months because of the scale of its task, is not expected to name suspected culprits.
Any criminal investigation will be up to Pakistani authorities, but Munoz has said the commission's findings could complement government efforts.
A UN spokeswoman in Islamabad said a UN office there had been closed for three days due to security fears in connection with the release of the report.
Despite the accusations against Mehsud, conspiracy theories have abounded in Pakistan over who was behind the suicide gun-and-bomb attack on Bhutto just weeks after she returned from self-imposed exile.
She was mistrusted by sections of the Pakistani military and security establishment and speculation has lingered that she was the victim of a plot by allies of Musharraf who did not want her to come to power.
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