Pakistan 'failed to protect Bhutto'

The 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani leader, could have been prevented and Pakistani officials failed to properly investigate her murder, a United Nations commission has found. In a damning report released on Thursday, the three-member UN panel investigating the killing blamed failures at all levels of the Pakistani government and said security measures to protect her had been "fatally insufficient." "Ms Bhutto's assassination could have been prevented if adequate security measures had been taken," the inquiry's 65-page report said. It added that the panel, headed by Heraldo Munoz, Chile's UN ambassador, believed the Pakistani police's failure to probe the slaying effectively "was deliberate." "These officials, in part fearing intelligence agencies' involvement, were unsure of how vigorously they ought to pursue actions, which they knew, as professionals, they should have taken," it added. Farhatullah Babar, a spokesman for Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, said the findings of the UN report were in line with the party's own views on the killing. "It is quite obvious that the suicide bomber did not act alone," he told. He said the party would be issuing a detailed comment on the report once it had studied the document in detail.