By Muhammad Najeeb, IANS
Islamabad : Pakistani detectives have identified former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassin, a private television channel reported Tuesday, even as the Scotland Yard team probing last month’s assassination met President Pervez Musharraf.
“The identity of the gunman who fired shots on Bhutto has been traced by the Pakistani detectives with the help of the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA),” ARY television said in its news bulletin quoting unnamed sources.
The report said police had raided the house of the suspected killer in Swabi, a town in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) bordering Afghanistan, and arrested “a few persons”.
When contacted, an official of the interior ministry refused to comment on the report saying, “there is some progress but we cannot make it public at this stage”.
In several of the videos of the assassination aired by different TV channels the killer is clearly shown firing shots at Bhutto before she fell into the jeep through the sunroof from where she was acknowledging the cheers of her supporters before the attack on Dec 27 in Rawalpindi.
Meanwhile, the president’s office confirmed that the British investigators Tuesday met Musharraf and discussed the progress in the probe of Bhutto’s assassination that sparked a wave of bloody rioting and forced general elections to be postponed by six weeks until Feb 18.
A Pakistani detective who solved the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl has joined the probe.
Zubair Mahmood will work with a team of British detectives, a senior government official told IANS.
An interior ministry official said Mahmood’s experience in handling high-profile cases would be very helpful in the probe that is looking into the exact circumstances in which the former prime minister died.
Pearl, an American journalist, was kidnapped in Karachi in January 2002 and beheaded by an Al Qaeda leader.
Meanwhile, the Scotland Yard team examined the remains of those killed in the Dec 27 blast. “They took photographs and collected samples of shreds and pieces collected from the blast site,” the interior ministry official said.