Deutsche Presse-Agentur
12/29/2007
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Islamabad - Pro-Taliban militants on Saturday denied the claim of the Pakistani government that they were involved in the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, media reports said.

Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema claimed late Friday that law enforcement agencies had intercepted a telephone call which proved that Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the newly-formed Tehrik-e- Taliban Pakistan (Taliban Movement Pakistan), was behind the attack.

'The government is trying to defame the tribesmen,' Maulvi Omar, a spokesman for the militants, told the BBC's Urdu Service by telephone from an undisclosed location.

Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan is an umbrella organization of several Islamic militant groups in the country's ungoverned tribal areas, where thousands of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters sough refuge after US invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Its leader Mehsud is also believed to have close ties with al-Qaeda.

Pakistan's extremist groups were believed to be enraged over the Bush administration's efforts to broker an alliance between President Pervez Musharraf and the popular Bhutto to create a stable, civilian- run government in the nuclear-armed state and increase the fight against Islamic militancy emanating from the volatile tribal belt.

But Omar claimed Benazir Bhutto's murder was a political matter.

'There is a very strong possibility that the (country's) intelligence agencies were behind the attack,' he said, adding that the murder seemed to be the continuation of the same political feud between the Bhutto family and the military through which her father and two brothers were killed.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Benazir's father, was ousted as prime minister in 1977 by military dictator Zia ul Haq and later hanged. His sons Shahnawaz Bhutto and Murtza Bhutto both also died under mysterious circumstances in the following years. Bhutto supporters blamed the country's intelligence agencies for their deaths.

Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) rejected the Interior Ministry explanation that the Taliban ordered the hit as a cover up.

'We do not know it is a genuine transcript or a one crafted in a dark room by the intelligence agencies,' party spokesman Farhatullah Babar said of the electronic intercept of Mehud.

The government has given conflicting statements in the last two days in explaining Bhutto's death.

Initially, health officials said she died from bullets fired by the assassin, who then blew himself up as Bhutto was waving to the crowd from the sunroof of her bullet-proof vehicle after a campaign rally in Rawalpindi on Thursday afternoon.

But Interior Ministry spokesman said on Friday that the medical report showed Benazir with a skull fracture after hitting an iron lock on the sunroof of her vehicle.

'However, she was also fired at but not a single bullet hit her,' he said.

'It was a targeted killing by a sharp shooter,' Babar insisted, demanding 'the same sort of international inquiry into the murder' of Bhutto as was conducted in after the car bomb assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005.

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