WASHINGTON — United States intelligence analysts are not convinced by the evidence offered so far by Pakistani authorities that a militant linked to Al Qaeda was responsible for Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, American officials said Tuesday.
Pakistani authorities, working from a single intelligence intercept collected the day after Ms. Bhutto’s death, have identified a militant leader, Baitullah Mehsud, as the chief suspect behind the attack.
“As far as I know, the Pakistanis are saying this is it, this is the proof,” said a senior State Department official, who, like other officials contacted for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation. “Before our guys say yes or no, they need a hell of a lot more than one thing, even if it is a substantial piece of evidence.”
As American officials disclosed Tuesday that the Bush administration had differed with Ms. Bhutto’s representatives over how best to improve security for her, questions surrounding her assassination mounted, adding to the pressure for outside involvement in the inquiry.
A Pentagon official said that American analysts were examining several other potential enemies of Ms. Bhutto, including elements of Pakistani Taliban groups and other Islamic extremists. “There are so many people who’d want to kill her, it’s difficult to ascribe any one agency,” the official said.
American officials said that the United States did not have access to all the information available to Pakistani authorities, and that in the end, Mr. Mehsud might well be held responsible for the attack on Ms. Bhutto. Based in the South Waziristan tribal areas near the Afghan border, Mr. Mehsud has been accused by Pakistani officials of being behind most of the suicide attacks on government, military and intelligence targets in recent months.
With skepticism growing inside and outside Pakistan about the competence and objectivity of the investigation into Ms. Bhutto’s assassination, President Pervez Musharraf is expected as early as Wednesday to ask Scotland Yard to send technicians to help with the inquiry, an American official said.
Senior Bush administration officials and American lawmakers from both parties have privately been urging Mr. Musharraf to allow international involvement in the inquiry to give it credibility with Ms. Bhutto’s family and supporters, and to help tamp down civil unrest.
While a team of forensic experts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been standing by to fly to Pakistan, an American official said Tuesday that sending British specialists from Scotland Yard would be less likely to inflame tensions in Pakistan.
Outside experts joining the inquiry are unlikely to assuage Ms. Bhutto’s most fervent supporters, including her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, and her 19-year-old son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who has been chosen as chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party.
The elder Mr. Zardari has called for an inquiry modeled on one by the United Nations after the 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese premier. Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Mahmud Ali Durrani, seemed to rule out that possibility, saying in a telephone interview on Monday that such an international investigation posed “a lot of complications.”
The elder Mr. Zardari has also complained that the Bush administration failed to press Mr. Musharraf’s government hard enough to provide adequate security for his wife during her campaign.
On Tuesday, however, American officials fired back, saying they had provided a constant flow of threat reports to Ms. Bhutto and her political advisers, even before she returned to Pakistan on Oct. 18 after a self-imposed exile.
American intelligence officials said they never received a credible threat of an attack with a specific date, time or place. Short of that, they said, Ms. Bhutto, a strongly opinionated, two-time prime minister, decided she would mount an aggressive political campaign.
“U.S. officials repeatedly met with and spoke with former Prime Minister Bhutto and members of her party — including Zardari — to discuss her security concerns,” the State Department official said. “It was general advice, not what route to take or which rally to attend.”
The official said that each time Ms. Bhutto or her advisers requested the administration’s help in getting increased security for her from the Musharraf government, administration or embassy officials pressed her case with Pakistani authorities. On the day she was killed, Ms. Bhutto was riding in an armored car after a political rally in Rawalpindi.
The State Department official said diplomats at the United States Embassy in Islamabad, including Ambassador Anne W. Patterson, were in daily contact with officials from Ms. Bhutto’s party. The Americans passed along information and specific advice on private security contractors to hire, counsel that Ms. Bhutto and her aides apparently spurned, the official said.
Diplomats and security experts at the American Embassy, for example, discouraged Ms. Bhutto from hiring American or British private security firms, fearing that a Western guard detail would draw too much attention to her and become a target.
Security officers at the embassy instead recommended the names of half a dozen Pakistani security companies that the United States and other Western countries had used to protect their personnel, the State Department official said. “The local companies employed guards who spoke the language and knew the landscape,” the official said.
But Ms. Bhutto and her husband rejected that suggestion, the official said, apparently fearing that even the reputable Pakistani firms might be infiltrated by extremists.
“Was she aware of the threat? Of course, she was aware,” said the Pentagon official. “But I don’t know how foolproof you can make any security when people are willing to kill themselves.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/world/asia/02inquiry.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin