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Pakistan court indicts police chief over Bhutto killing

05 November 2011 15:04 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Habil Suleymanzadeh â€“ APA. A Pakistani anti-terror court Saturday indicted two police officers and five alleged Taliban militants over the 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, a prosecutor said, APA reports quoting â€œAgence France Presseâ€.

Nobody has been convicted or jailed for Bhutto’s assassination on December 27, 2007, in Rawalpindi, a garrison city near the capital Islamabad, in a gun and suicide attack after she addressed an election rally.

The death of the charismatic, Oxford-educated Bhutto, the first woman to become prime minister of a Muslim nation, threw the country into chaos, sparking violence and months of political turmoil.

Police say that three other suspects in the high-profile case have been killed -- including the chief of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud -- and two remain at large.

"Seven accused including two police officers have been indicted," public prosecutor Chaudhry Azhar told AFP. The police were arrested a year ago while the suspected militants have been in custody for nearly four years.

The police officers were Saud Aziz, who was the Rawalpindi police chief at the time of the killing, and Khurram Shahzad, another senior policeman.

The five suspected militants are Sher Zaman, Hasnain Gul, Rafaqat Hussain, Abdul Rasheed and Aitzaz Shah from the troubled northwest of the country, Azhar said.

All seven accused were indicted at the court in a high-security prison in Rawalpindi.

At the time of Bhutto’s death, then president Pervez Musharraf blamed Mehsud for the killing.

Musharraf, who lives in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai, is also wanted over Bhutto’s death. Prosecutors issued an arrest warrant in February over what they said was his failure to provide her with enough security.

Mehsud was killed in a US drone attack in August 2009, one of the most high-profile casualties of the covert American campaign targeting Al-Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt on the Afghan border.

Bhutto, who served two terms as prime minister, had returned from exile two months before she was killed to stand for election.

Her widower Asif Ali Zardari led her Pakistan People’s Party to election victory in February 2008, returning Pakistan to civilian government, and is now president.