UNITED NATIONS: UN chief Ban Ki-moon plans to give the panel probing the 2007 assassination of Pakistan’s ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto until late March to complete its work, his spokesman said in a statement on Thursday.
The UN panel, which began its investigation last July 1 and was to have submitted its report Thursday, will now be given until March 31 to do so, the statement said.
“Because of the substantial amount of information collected by the commission in Pakistan and further follow-up work that remains, the commissioners requested additional time to complete their report,” spokesman Martin Nesirky said.
He added that Ban notified both the Pakistani government and the UN Security Council about the decision.
The three-member panel is headed by Chilean ambassador to the UN Heraldo Munoz and includes Indonesian ex-attorney general Marzuki Darusman and Peter Fitzgerald, an Irish former police official.
Bhutto, the first woman to become prime minister of a Muslim country, was killed on December 27, 2007 in a gun and suicide attack after addressing an election rally in Rawalpindi, a garrison city near the capital Islamabad.
Her supporters have cast doubt on an initial Pakistani probe into her death, questioning whether she was killed by a gunshot or the blast and criticizing authorities for hosing down the scene of the attack within minutes.
An investigation by British detectives also said that Bhutto was killed by the force of a suicide bomb and not gunfire, backing the Pakistani government’s controversial account of how the opposition leader died.
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