WASHINGTON — The CIA believes that Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mahsud and his associates, some linked to Al Qaeda, were responsible for the assassination last month of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, a U.S. intelligence official said Thursday.
"There are strong indications that Baitullah Mahsud was behind the Bhutto assassination," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. "There is certainly no reason to doubt that Mahsud was behind this."
The intelligence official said he could not disclose how the CIA had reached that conclusion, including whether the assessment was based, at least in part, on a telephone call that Pakistani authorities say they intercepted shortly after Bhutto was killed. In that call, a man said to be Mahsud congratulates a cleric who claims that his associates carried out the killing.
Mahsud has denied involvement in the attack on Bhutto on Dec. 27 after a political rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. But Mahsud, a tribal leader in northwest Pakistan, has not publicly commented on the purported call.
The CIA assessment concurred with that of Pakistani officials, who have said they believe that Mahsud was most likely behind the assassination, as well as an attack on Bhutto's convoy in October, hours after she returned to Pakistan from a self-imposed eight-year exile.
But an associate of Bhutto's said Thursday that her Pakistan People's Party was deeply skeptical of the CIA's assertions, especially when so little in the way of a forensic criminal investigation has been done. Party officials say that most, if not all, of the evidence in the case was destroyed by police and firefighters who hosed down the site within hours of the shooting and suicide attack, making it virtually impossible to gather evidence to help determine who else might have been involved.
"Whoever is now identified as responsible by state sources, we would need to know how they came to any conclusions, as we are uncomfortable with the cover-up that was done on the ground after Ms. Bhutto's assassination," the party official said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by Pakistani officials.
