ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan will ask Interpol for help in arresting ex-President Pervez Musharraf regarding his failure to prevent the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the interior minister said Tuesday.
Rehman Malik said the government was seeking Musharraf’s arrest because he purportedly failed to provide adequate security for Bhutto, who was killed in a gun and suicide bomb attack in 2007.
He made the comments in a televised address to lawmakers in Sindh province, Bhutto’s political stronghold.
An Interpol spokesman said any eventual request from Pakistan would be “assessed in accordance with our rules and regulations.” The spokesman for the Lyon, France-based international police agency was not authorized to be publicly named, in accordance with Interpol policy.
Musharraf, a one-time U.S. ally, went into self-exile in Britain in 2008 after being forced out of the presidency he secured in a 1999 military coup. The current government is being run by Musharraf’s political rivals, and the president is Bhutto’s widower and political heir.
A Pakistani court issued an arrest warrant for Musharraf last year over the allegations.
Musharraf, an ex-army general who wants to return to Pakistan to contest what will be bitterly contested elections likely this year, said the government was playing politics over the case. Musharraf has repeatedly denied any legal responsibility in the killing.
“This is all politics,” he told ARY television station Tuesday. “It’s just point-scoring and nothing else.”
Pakistan may ask Interpol to issue a so-called red notice, the agency’s highes tlevel alert, equivalent to putting a suspect on its most wanted list. Such a notice on Musharraf would alert police in all member countries to heed the Pakistani warrant and arrest Musharraf.
It is unclear whether Malik will go ahead with histhreat.
The former prime minister was killed on Dec. 27, 2007, shortly after returning to Pakistan to campaign in elections Musharraf agreed to allow after months of domestic and international pressure.
Two police officers and five purported members of the Pakistani Taliban have been charged in the assassination. But President Asif Ali Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party has continued hinting that it believes that Musharraf or his allies may have been involved.
Zardari asked the U.N. to investigate the assassination. The probe found Musharraf’s government didn’t do enough to ensure Bhutto’s security and criticized stepstaken by investigators after her death, including hosing down the crime scene and failing to perform an autopsy.
The U.N. officials were not asked to find out who the culprits were. But they identified two main threats facing Bhutto: Islamist extremists such as al-Qaida and the Taliban who opposed her links to the West and her secular outlook, and members of the “Pakistani Establishment,” the term used locally to refer to a powerful and shady network of military, intelligence, political and business leaders that the Pakistan People’s Party has long maintained is an enemy of the party.
Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was executed in 1979 by a military dictator,and the party’s rhetoric has long been infused with tales of political martyrdom at the hands of the army.
After her death, the Pakistan People’s Party rode a wave of public sympathy to garner the most seats in the February 2008 elections. Months later, the party forced Musharraf to step down as president by threatening impeachment, and the presidency was eventually won by Bhutto’s widower, Zardari.
Musharraf later left for London and has since spent a good deal of time on the lecture circuit, including in the United States.
Information for this article was contributed from Paris by Angela Charlton of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 02/22/2012