CIA Blames Bhutto Killing on Militant

By Mark Mazzetti New York Times News Service

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that the assassins of the former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto were directed by Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani militant leader in hiding, and that some of them had ties to al-Qaida.

The CIA’s judgment is the first formal assessment by the American government about who was responsible for Bhutto’s Dec. 27 assassination, which took place during a political rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi.

"There are powerful reasons to believe that terror networks around Baitullah Mehsud were responsible," said one American intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

The official said that "different pieces of information" have pointed toward Mehsud’s responsibility, but he would not provide any details about the information that led to the CIA’s conclusion.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the CIA director, discussed the agency’s conclusion in an interview with The Washington Post published Friday.

Some friends and supporters of Bhutto’s questioned the CIA conclusions, especially since the former leader was buried before a full forensic investigation had been conducted. The British government has since sent a team from Scotland Yard to participate in the investigation into the assassination.

"The CIA appears too eager to bail out its liaison services in Pakistan, who are being blamed by most Pakistanis," said Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to Bhutto and a professor at Boston University.

"Given the division inside Pakistan on this issue, it might be better to have an international investigation under the aegis of the U.N.," Haqqani said.

Within days of Bhutto’s assassination, Pakistani authorities announced that they had intercepted communications between Mehsud and militant supporters in which they said the leader congratulated his followers for the assassination and appeared to take credit for it.

Mehsud, through a spokesman, has denied responsibility for the assassination and suggested that the assassins were directed by Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president and a longtime rival of Bhutto’s.

Members of Bhutto’s political party, along with some of her family members, have also challenged Pakistani government accounts of the assassination. They have blamed Musharraf for failing to provide Bhutto with adequate protection as she campaigned around the country, and some have hinted that elements of Pakistan’s government may have been behind the assassination.

American and Pakistani officials have blamed Mehsud’s followers for many recent suicide attacks against government, military and intelligence targets in Pakistan. Based in the South Waziristan tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, Mehsud runs training camps and dispatches suicide bombers beyond the border areas in both countries, the officials say. He is also believed to have links to the Arab and Central Asian militants who have established a stronghold in the tribal areas.

Government officials in Pakistan and independent security analysts believe that the al-Qaida network in Pakistan is increasingly made up not of foreign fighters but of homegrown militants who have made destabilizing Pakistan’s government a top priority.

American intelligence officials believe that al-Qaida has steadily built a safe haven in the mountainous tribal areas of western Pakistan, constructing a band of makeshift compounds where both Pakistani militants and foreign fighters conduct training and plan for terror attacks.

This has led to mounting frustration among intelligence and counterterrorism officials, many of whom believe that the United States should take more aggressive unilateral steps to dismantle terror networks in the tribal areas. The Bush administration is currently considering various proposals to step up covert actions in Pakistan against the Qaida network.

(c) 2008 Deseret News (Salt Lake City). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.