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...report's claims against the Musharraf government have been denounced by Musharraf's spokesman as a "pack of lies." After twin suicide bombers attacked Bhutto's homecoming procession in October 2007, killing 149 people, the threats to her life were plain to see. But according to the report, the Musharraf government, though "fully aware and tracking" such threats, did little more than pass them on "to her and to provincial authorities, and were not proactive in neutralizing them." The Musharraf government also failed to provide Bhutto the security it granted two other former Prime Ministers from Musharraf's party...
...Bhutto might have survived the attempt on her life had proper security measures been in place, the report says; it places particular emphasis on Saud Aziz, the chief police officer on duty in Rawalpindi that day. Arrangements made by him were deemed "ineffective and insufficient." The security plan drawn up on Dec. 27, 2007, the day of her assassination, was "flawed" and in many respects not even implemented. Too few police officers had been deployed to the political rally where she delivered her last speech. And there was poor coordination with her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) security...
...Following the assassination, the report continues, Aziz allegedly ordered the controversial hosing-down of the scene, washing away crucial evidence less than two hours after Bhutto's death. The U.N. panel suggested that the police chief may have been acting on instructions from within the military. Aziz was criticized for obstructing attempts to perform an autopsy, delaying investigators' access to the scene, leaving them able to collect only 23 pieces of evidence out of an expected yield of thousands. Aziz now serves as the chief police officer in the southern Punjabi city of Multan and did not return TIME...
...commission was also highly critical of the "pervasive role" played by Pakistan's leading spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), then headed by Lieut. General Nadeem Taj, a key Musharraf ally and relative. While the ISI had no mandate to conduct criminal investigations, the report says its agents maintained a constant presence around the police probe. And the lack of a mandate didn't stop it from pursuing its own private investigation, the results of which were only sparingly and selectively shared with the police. There were also "credible assertions of politicized and clandestine action by the intelligence services" concerning...
...Iqbal Cheema, a senior official at the Interior Ministry, held a press conference, on Musharraf's instructions, to pin the assassination on Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed last August in a rocket strike in South Waziristan - a claim later supported by the CIA. According to the report, it was no secret that Pakistan's militants loathed Bhutto and her stance against Islamist violence. But the Musharraf government's "hasty" announcement, the report says, "was premature at best" and "prejudiced the police investigations which had not yet begun...